Ruthless V6Ch6-Reconnaissance Wolves

Who could have known the whole wasp force would start to self-destruct as soon as the leader died? James thought as he laughed. The sight of the enemies dying, tearing themselves apart, or simply standing down was rather absurd, considering how he had spent much of the fight trying to avoid being swarmed by the Wasp Queen’s devoted followers.

He finally shook his head and looked down at the corpse.

The Queen was pretty tough after all, James assessed. It took me an embarrassingly long time to kill her, and she melted half my face off. Although I guess to the soldiers and the other Rulers, it probably looked impressive enough. But I really did remarkably little damage until near the end. It was hard to make as much of an impact in the air, when I was mostly using my powers just to keep her from flying out of reach.

He reached a hand toward the Wasp Queen’s body, which, by its appearance, showed the truth of his assessment. Aside from a broken limb or two and the severed wings, it was almost intact. She’d been a tough bug. The Queen had even earned him a level when he killed her. He hoped the System would give him something good here.

Pillage.

[Precision Paper Wasp Queen’s body processed.]

The body began glowing slightly.

[You obtained Precision Vespid Exoarmor and Concentrated Vespid Venom! Designate a target for pillaging: Stats, Skills, Talents, or Titles.]

James chose Title, since those always seemed to be fairly powerful, and this was a Ruler.

[Title obtained: Hive Queen!]

[Existing Title, Pack Leader, detected! Redundant Hive Queen Title merged into existing Title Pack leader.]

Oh. Well, that seems like it was probably useless…

His mind was pulled away from the unimpressive result of his Title theft as the other function of Pillage continued its work. The body stopped glowing, and two items appeared

In keeping with the System’s announcement, the exoskeleton had somehow turned itself into a suit of armor that seemed designed to fit James’s body and to assist him in flying—with wings included, despite the fact that he had exerted quite a lot of effort earlier in ripping them off. There was also a vial of yellow-green viscous-looking liquid, but James knew what that was and quickly stashed it in his magic satchel.

He didn’t need Concentrated Vespid Venom right now—not when his body was already studying it and trying to figure out how to replicate it for itself. Maybe there would be someone else in his country who could make use of the stuff.

No meat this time. Maybe the System had assumed that the wasp’s body would be unappetizing to any human. Even James, despite being an Omnivore, had no real objection to that judgment.

He looked in front of him, focused on the armor, and read the description that appeared.

[Precision Vespid Exoarmor: Maximally aerodynamic armor that once protected the matriarch of a vespid species, before she perished in battle. Adjusted to fit the form of her killer’s Race. Contains a powerful speed-enhancing energy. Boosts Agility by 200 when worn. Grants access to the skill Vespid Flight, which cannot be transferred from the armor.]

Not bad. Not bad at all.

It would be a fine replacement for the Royal Exoarmor that had been battered almost to uselessness in his previous battles, at least. It was probably considerably tougher, considering that the Wasp Queen had been an actual Ruler, probably with significant battle experience before she ever met James, rather than a relatively inexperienced Ruler candidate like the Spider Queen. He focused in on the Skill the armor granted.

[Vespid Flight: Engage in rapid, precise, seemingly physics-defying flight through the air. Change directions on a dime, and carry weights that your wings seem too small to bear. Wing movements are thought-directed, functioning as additional limbs. Consumes Mana and Stamina.]

So her flight was magical. Well, that makes sense. I guess if you’re an insect this big without magic, you’d probably be unable to stand up under your own weight, let alone fly. He was pretty sure that was why he had read insects this large did not exist in nature. It was hard for creatures to endure gravity without endoskeletons.

We surrender, Your Majesty.

A single voice intruded into James’s thoughts—but he could feel more than one mind contained inside that voice. Hundreds of individuals spoke collectively.

It was the wasp colony, of course.

He had usurped the Queen’s authority over them with her death. If the Title he had stolen wasn’t a big enough clue of what would happen, the telepathic message was an explicit acknowledgement that the Precision Paper Wasps, as a group, had accepted him as their new Ruler.

I accept your surrender, James replied instantly. You are now part of my Kingdom. I’ll announce it to the others so they don’t try to kill you. Now go and support the rest of my army in killing off our enemies. Make sure that no Ruler escapes. They all had their chance to surrender. None of them can be allowed to avoid the fate that your Queen suffered.

Hail the Fisher King! That collective voice rang through his mind again—rang with an intense, unquestioning obedience that James had never experienced before. Even the wolf pack, though they obeyed him without reservation and appeared fanatically loyal, clearly engaged in independent thought and dialogue. They had meaningful preferences. Sometimes they made requests of James, just as they sought to obey his orders.

The wolves felt like people, as did the Goblins, the alligators, the bats, and the squirrels.

Perhaps the wasps were like that, too, but their thought processes were entirely opaque to James. They spoke with one voice in a way that felt alien and robotic. They might have an incredibly fast communication system rooted in the quality of their hive, that no wasp was particularly strong-willed. They were all simply nodes in a great machine. Servants to their leader’s purpose. It was a little off-putting.

But as he watched the wasps shoot toward the Rat King and begin attacking the thousands of rats that made up its body, stinging them and spraying acid onto them without regard for their own safety, James told himself that he would get used to the differences.

Then James received another message.

My King, we’ve found them.

Alan and the others were lost no longer, it seemed.

Alive? James sent.

The older male is certainly alive, but they are not all kept together, Luna replied. I am not certain if all of the humans who came to this city are accounted for. There have been sightings of ten of them. There may be others, but we have kept our distance and attempted to maintain stealth, as instructed. I do not believe we have been spotted. We only await your order to attack and retrieve them.

Where are you? James asked.

Luna began relaying a series of images to James’s mind in answer. He saw the city through her eyes and witnessed some of her memories on fast forward. It started off when the wolf pack split off from the Army at the city’s periphery. There was a lot of running through the Orlando streets and passing rapidly through what he could tell were various territories—he could feel the aura of the other Rulers in her memory as she followed her nose.

She was slowed for skirmishes several times, but on each occasion, a few of the lower ranking wolves stopped and took the fight for her, allowing their leader to run on.

Later, Luna deliberately slowed down and confronted a pair of what looked like human-sized lizards with feathers and long talons.

No, that’s what dinosaurs looked like, right? James thought. He remembered hearing that some of the monstrous reptiles might have had feathers, contrary to what the science fiction movies he had watched as a child would have led him to believe.

Luna and the rest of the wolves that had kept pace with her leaped upon the dinosaurs without much hesitation and tore them apart. Luna herself was larger than the reptiles, and the other wolves that had kept pace with her were human-sized just like the dinosaurs.

The fight was over in ten seconds. The dinosaurs lay in pieces, and Luna’s System interface told James that they had been something called Vorpal Velociraptors.

Dinosaurs confirmed, then.

But why had she stopped to kill them? The creatures had not been moving to confront her, as far as James could tell.

Then the Wolf Queen put her nose to the ground and resumed following a trail. James could smell it again himself, through her senses. Before, the scent had been incredibly faint—almost like a feeling that Luna had a lot of faith in, rather than something James would have felt confident following. But now it was much clearer.

The smell was Alan. His aftershave? His essence as a human being? James didn’t know or care. Whatever it was, it was subtle, but Luna had managed to memorize it from her prior encounters with the man. It had led her across the city, and now the source was close.

That was why she had stopped to kill these dinosaurs. They stood between her and her targets.

James observed as she and the other wolves at the forefront of the pack scouted the perimeter of the area where the humans were apparently being kept, a run-down apartment complex. Luna ordered the rest of the wolf pack to stay back, to lessen the risk that they would break stealth. As those slightly slower wolves arrived in staggered bunches, they obeyed, moving into alleys and abandoned buildings where they could lie in wait without being noticed.

Luna walked around the complex until she got close to her primary target, Alan. James could smell the older man’s odor so intensely, he felt as if Alan was standing in the same room with him—or, in terms of pre-System James, as if he and Alan were standing uncomfortably close.

Then it was a matter of finding a place where she had a clear line of sight.

Luna could hear movement and conversation occurring, muffled, through the walls of the complex. But she did not hear Alan’s voice.

Not until the smell of him was so close that James knew she could almost touch Alan.

If Luna just leaped through a few layers of wall, she might snatch the Healer away in her teeth.

Instead, the Wolf Queen more prudently gave the others who were scouting her position, for reference, with the key information that she had found Alan’s location, and then walked around for several minutes more until she had a good place to perform further scouting. There was no reason to rush into things; the Vorpal Velociraptors and whatever other creatures might be holding Alan captive had no reason to expect danger from the wolves just yet. The wolves had skirmished quickly and quietly with those that they had killed.

Luna might as well reap the benefits of that stealth for as long as she could, before she initiated a fight in which the captives might very well become hostages and then targets, or at the least potential collateral damage.

Her patience had its reward.

Through a broken window, the Wolf Queen spied Alan at work. He was in an apartment living room that had been converted into a miniature hospital, with multiple beds—though only one was occupied at the time.

Alan was healing the bed’s occupant, one of the dinosaurs. It appeared to have been bitten all over by some other monster, or perhaps to have encountered some acid that had left it worse for wear. The bed where the patient lay was at the far end of the room Luna was spying on, so all that was clear was raw, reddened flesh that was missing scale coverage—to which Alan was applying his healing energies.

The image confirmed one of James’s theories about why Alan had been kept alive despite being held prisoner in a hostile city for some weeks.

Alan even stepped backward, as the patient sat up, and Luna’s ears picked up the sound of a chain clanking. Not only was he a captive, Alan was wearing some form of manacles—though the height of the window prevented Luna from seeing the Healer’s lower body. Perhaps Alan had tried to escape, though that raised the question of why he had not come when James tried to summon him home. Maybe there was some magical barrier stopping him from going.

The next moment, James’s other hypothesis for why Alan had stayed was confirmed.

As the dinosaur patient got up and left, rubbing at its freshly regenerated flesh with the back of one of its paws, the door to the makeshift infirmary opened. Another velociraptor led in a handful of the humans who James remembered being with Alan on the day they had lost contact.

“Hey Alan,” the velociraptor said.

“Hi Steve,” Alan replied in a distracted voice.

“Proof of life, as promised,” Steve said.

Alan nodded.

Steve started to turn around and take the humans back with him, but Alan began to object.

“Wait, wait,” he said. “Have you given any more thought to what we discussed?”

What followed was an obvious rehash of a previous discussion the two had previously had. Alan was trying to persuade the dinosaurs to let them go, and Steve argued that the humans could not survive in the city on their own, that their Ruler would only be angered by bringing the idea up, and that the dinosaurs had saved their lives, so the humans owed them.

“But nevertheless, did you ask him about it at all?” Alan asked.

Steve bared his teeth at the older man and snarled, “It’s time to give up these ideas of negotiating for your freedom, Alan! If someone was coming for you, they would have done it by now. You’re a Healer, so you can’t fight. You have to be realistic about these things!”

Alan looked angry but completely impotent to do anything about it.

A few seconds later, the other humans and Steve filed out of the room.

I’m looking forward to killing the dinosaurs, James thought. Not words I ever expected to hear myself think, but there we are.