The day after those intensive Mind revelations with Beck, I was trying to figure out how to die.

Okay, maybe I was being a bit dramatic, but seriously. I had gone to sleep perfectly happily after having eaten a delightful dinner, but this morning. This morning.

This. Morning.

Bella and Belle had apparently become really enthusiastic about their meat honey after I had given them high praise, so they had stayed up laboring, perfecting the process and making stores of honey. The storage area was now using space extremely effectively, housing dense foodstuffs within the wax combs in the classic honeycomb fashion.

But this morning. This morning I had walked in on them making the honey.

Excuse me.

“You are such a drama queen. I’m supposed to be the queen.”

You bees. You could never comprehend how utterly nasty it was to see that. I would prefer not to describe it, but it was all over. The memory of… that had already been stored away, ready to be retrieved at a moment’s notice. I needed to have an auto-delete feature to instantly remove any and all horrific memories.

“Forget that. Welcome, babies!”

As Queen spoke, the five Linker Bee eggs hatched all at once. The little grubs were starting to look a bit cute even. Especially these. They were so small! Wait. What in tarnation!?

Usually, the grubs that hatched were quite tiny. Comparing sizes, I was up to most of the humans’ waists, and the workers were about half my size on average. The bees that were around that size grew up from grubs smaller than my head. As of now, the only bees that were still that size even after maturing were Ben and Beelzebub. Even then, both were somehwat bigger than my head for comparison’s sake.

These guys were shrinking.

The grubs the size of my head were continuing to shrink and shrink. And shrink. Finally, they stopped, ending up smaller than my freaking eyes.

“Uh. Hi there, little guys.”

…

Nothing. Hm. So, were these Linker Bees drone types? Judging by how they were just sort of crawling around, not sending anything through the Link besides sensory information, that seemed to be the case.

“Alright. It’s a bit early I think, but if they’re drone types, then we don’t need to wait for them to figure their shit out. Let’s just go try to Link to the humans, then.”

I gathered up the five tiny bees and let them cling onto my torso as we floated our way out of the central hive towards the dirt ball. Actually, if the humans in this world were anywhere near the same size as humans from my world, then these Linker Bees were the first normal-sized bees I had created. I suppose rather than tiny, they were quite ordinary.

Those tiny bees clung to my hairs as all of us floated away. Yup. Just me, the Linker Bees, and Beatrice. Was she a ninja or something?

“Hey Beatrice. I thought you were going to be developing a production plan for the meat honey? Oh, I suppose you’ve already done it. Wow, you’re good.”

Beatrice beamed with pride all the way to the dirt prison. Honestly? She deserved that feeling of pride. Beatrice had been tirelessly working to make sure the hive ran smoothly and expanded as efficiently as possible. I wish I could afford to give her time to chill out, but honestly, she would probably hate that. I had to think of some other way to reward her. How do you reward someone for whom work is the reward?

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In any case, the time was upon us. I dragged out Yelah and Dip once again, apparently waking them up. Oops.

“Quick. One of you Linker Bees, uh, Link to her!”

I wasn’t sure what to expect. One of the Linkers buzzed down to Yelah’s disoriented neck and stung her.

Wha.

“Ow! The fuck is that?”

Oh shit! I sent a mental signal for Yelah to stop moving because her hand was going for the classic neck slap. Okay. Okay, calm the hell down, Beatrice! So much just happened right there.

Linker Bee number one was currently attached just above the nape of Yelah’s neck, unmoving. As soon as it had stuck its stinger into her neck, a Link had been created in a mere instant. I had been confused for a moment, but looking back with the B-boxes, I could see that the Link had been created quickly and without resistance. Or, to be more correct, the Link had been lunk.

Now, that didn’t make a lot of sense, but bear with me. I was getting an idea of how exactly the Linker Bees worked.

Essentially, they were Link parasites.

I hadn’t mentioned it because it was so normal for me, but the Linker Bees had been included in the Kin Link automatically as soon as they had been born. That Kin Link that the Linker Bees had was a bit different, though.

And it was all tied to an Ability.

[Linker Stinger

Level 1

Acquired by: Birth

Link outside the links. By creating a physical connection, entangle the Mind.

Caution: Unless otherwise instructed, the user’s Mind will pull resources until Link is successfully established.

]

These Abilities, man. A quick look told me that the Link to LB1 had increased drastically, more than tripling. Tripling! It wasn’t breaking the bank, but it was certainly more than a Link to the simple drones should be.

Rather than actually Linking directly to Yelah’s Mind, the Linker Bee was hijacking her Mind somehow, using the physical connection of the stinger to attach its own link like a Mind leech.

As Yelah sat there with her arm raised, frozen in place, a horrified look on her face, I felt sick. This… this was terrible.

“This is fantastic! The Linker Bees are precisely what we needed. We should Link all of the humans immediately; the quicker we can learn their secrets and create a timeline, the better of a position we will be in.”

Hold on, Beatrice. Was this the price I was paying for convenience? Creating actual brain parasites? Now we were really monstrous. It was clear as day with Yelah still stuck in place.

“I do not understand your hesitation. This was always the plan. If you Linked your Mind to theirs in any other way, the goal was to have a one-way connection that allowed you to control them and prevent retaliation.”

But… it was so… disturbing seeing it in real life.

“…The rest of you. Go in there and Link with the other humans.”

I instructed the other Linker Bees to enter a small hole in the dirt ball, and one by one, they buzzed in. And one by one, I made each human be still. Regardless of my feelings on the matter, this was what we needed. Right?

Four humans and a penguin, sitting in a row. Two in dire health, oh my no.

“Okay. First off, hello. My name is… well, just call me Mother. I need to know right now: when will other humans be coming to find you?”

Yelah and Grehn, the big guy, looked at each other in bewilderment, probably because they were hearing my words beautifully translated straight into their heads in their own language. Surely, my vocabulary and word usage would sound sophisticated and unmatched in their heads.

“I… see. We are willing to comply if you help us live. Clearly, you would prefer us to live, so please. Help my friends.”

“I will. But I absolutely need that information.”

“…A month and a half. More likely eight weeks, but at minimum around six weeks.”

…Uh huh. Unfortunately for Yelah, I assumed she was lying. Any reasonable warden would. Of course, a typical prison guard wouldn’t have the entire contents of your brain to comb through to figure out the truth.

Yup. As soon as I had Linked to Yelah, my B-boxes went into overdrive. In moments, I technically ‘knew’ as much about this world as a full-grown adult mercenary woman who had lived here for twenty-six years. It wasn’t perfect for me. The knowledge was all sort of in my subconscious, not things I could think of off the top of my head. If I wanted to know anything, I would have to search.

Good thing the B-boxes could do that just as well.

At this point, I had a glorified search engine in my head. The knowledge, memories, and experiences of four competent mercenaries and their penguin buddy were all sitting quietly back there, being sorted and organized and filed away for whenever I needed them.

As for what Yelah had told me? Let me just… ‘how long until other humans come save mercenaries or complete job.’ And with that, the lie was exposed. The real minimum for her own company to specifically send a team to investigate her team’s disappearance was around three weeks.

Of course, it could be much worse.

Actually, a bit of panic was beginning to set in. We were well within the company’s timeframe, but they weren’t the only party involved. There was the city lord. Much more likely that he would become impatient and send another company in here. A week maybe?

“Beatrice. Put the hive on even higher alert, if that’s possible. If we don’t do something soon, teams of human mercenaries could be knocking on our door any second.

The humans had arrived at the hive around two days ago. Other than that, they had been trekking through the forest for a few days. Out of the week that they had been given for the Estimated Time of Completion, that time was nearly over. Within the next couple of days, they were already expected to return.

Fuck fuckity fuck! The city lord would definitely not be waiting for Hayrey and Sons’ Mercenary Company time policy to run out. That meant we had less than a week to do something, taking into account the time it would take for the mercenaries to make their way through the forest. Honestly, less if the city lord has already thrown a fit! Hell, they could be on their way right now!

“Just want to let you know that I know you’re lying, Yelah. It was the reasonable thing to do, but it doesn’t matter now. What does matter is that I would prefer not to have more humans know about us yet. Especially not with your City Lord’s paranoia about the vultures.”

“Now, I’ll help your two friends, but that won’t be enough. You’ll be helping us.”