After my work was done, I had the night free and was sitting near Flor as she wrote away at the paper, copying the book's content.

“So, boring during the night. It’s too dangerous in the streets damn it.” I mutter.

“Well have you explored all of your class’s skills yet?”

“Hmm… I got one weapon mastery, one skill to summon the bugs I own and two skills so I understand the bugs and a hive mind ability.” I said.

“What weapon… and what kind of strange class gives understanding of bugs and hive mind abilities?” Flor asked as she looked my way with a frown.

“It’s called Arthromancer and the weapon is a strange type of Glaive.” I replied.

Flor holds her chin with her left hand as she thinks and mutters out loud. “Arthro?... as in Arthropods, the phylum that signifies an invertebrate animal having an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and jointed appendages. Mancer reminds me of necromancer which is the controller of the dead so you are a controller of arthropods?”

“That is what I came to understand as well. Also I think only one person can have this class it seems. The requirements for it are sketchy at best from what I understand but it seems besides liking bugs and needing to know a lot about it you need to read a book on the third floor that holds all the blueprints for equipment that once belonged to the original Arthromancer’s.” I said.

“Wow, so lucky! To get an exclusive class, though I guess the content of the class would fit far too few people nowadays.”

“Yeah, a mass of power was pumped into my body that made a separate dimension in my body that holds the bugs. The skill to summon is basically a portal spell into that world.” I said.

“Wow, such a strange class… wait, a dimension. Have you checked inside yet?” She asked.

“Not yet, I have been getting curious but I haven’t had much time to check in on that.” I said.

“Want to see what it’s like?” She asked with a grin and sparkling eyes.

“Don’t you need to work?” I asked.

“This… I heard there was an app that you could access outside of the game so I will work on that also I am on night shift outside so I have plenty of time.” She said.

I chuckled at how simply she dodged work.

Shrugging at her own reasoning I stand up.

“Alright then let’s see this. [Hive Portal]” I said with intent to open the portal big enough for humans.

Intent to enter the hive personally detected. Several regions of the hive are still too small and undeveloped for you fit.

What region would you like to go to?

Queen Palace

Wilderness Zone

Misty Pond (undeveloped)

Forest (undeveloped)

…

“Hey is something wrong?” Flor asked.

“Yeah, it seems there are places we can’t enter because it’s still too small for humans.” I replied.

“Too small? Isn’t the world yours?”

“Don’t think so, it is a separate world that my bugs use as a home but that doesn’t mean it is under my control. I think the ‘Home’ areas would probably be created depending on the bugs that live there.” I said.

“Then how would it get to human size?” She asked, irritated.

“Obviously, I breed them to that size. I can make sentient bug races from the bugs I own through breeding.” I said.

Florista’s jaw dropped hearing what I said. After a moment she pulled herself together and asked.

“What places can you enter?”

“There are two, Queen Palace and Wilderness Zone.” I replied.

“Queen?” She said tilting her head.

“Queen is a race of bugs that are human formed and have sentience and probably above human intelligence. I got an egg for this race when I got the class since it seems all Arthromancers get one.”

“Ah, I see.” She said quietly.

“Let’s check the wilderness place.” She said and I nodded.

I press Wilderness Zone and instantly in front of me a circular portal 2 meters in diameter. The rim was shimmering a purple light while the area inside was pure black.

“Come on.” I said.

I hold my hand out and she grabs it as we walk into the portal.

Stepping through the black portal I feel my body spin as if I was in a washing machine. It lasted only a moment before I felt ground below my feet. My eyes were filled with a dim light.

As I look around I hear Florista’s voice and feel her hand pull away. Looking over I see her crouching over and throwing up. I frowned but understood what she was going through. The feeling of the teleportation was nauseating.

As I look back I notice the portal shrink to 1 cm in diameter. It meant that it was put on a standby until I invoked it again and it seems I can’t exit besides at this point.

I then looked around. The area was bare wasteland with no grass or life, no bugs, no trees, nothing.

“What is… this place?” Flor asked through shallow breaths.

I look up without answering and see what was lighting the place up. In the sky was a single dim glowing circle as if the sun was undergoing a solar eclipse .

“This place is really weird.” Flor said.

“Yeah, my best guess is that this wildness area is where bugs I don’t tame live. I think other things can also be sent here to live if I fill it with life but that ‘sun’ is strange.” I said.

Flor looked up and saw it as well.

“Maybe the blocked sun is related to your class like you need to do something before it is unblocked.” Flor said.

“True enough, I haven’t extensively checked out my copy of the book that talks about my class and the history of the clan. I may have to look through the skill zone which I haven’t looked through.” I said.

“Book? Didn’t you say it was on the third floor?” She asked.

“Yeah well… you see I kind of used the app on the phone to make an exact copy.” I said looking away.

“AHAHAH! THIS IS GREAT! The uptight and good boy stole a book!” Flor said laughing her ass off.

“SHUT UP! I’M NOT A BRAT! Yeah I know I stole it! So what, it held all the info for my class including the skills so bite me!” I said.

“Oh! So the book had all the skills, no wonder. You should check it out later so… get us out of here already.” She said.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

It took a moment before I understood but then I remembered that she somewhat hated horror related stuff and the eerie light gave the horror movie feel.

I force a grin down and open a small portal into the flies place and have them come out quietly.

Then once enough were around us but far enough to not get squashed by the scared woman in front of me.

With an order in my mind all the noisy winged lightning striders began beating their wings in unison.

“KYAAAAAAAAAAA~~!!!” Instantly Flor jumped and became pale, almost fainting but saw I was laughing and became red in rage.

“THAT ISN’T FUNNY!” She shouted and kicked me hard.

While I rolled on the ground gripping my manhood she looked at me like the bugs I control.

“That… was… cruel.” I said with a pained voice.

“Quiet!” She said in a cold tone. The eerie light from above didn’t help with her angry look. It made her look like a demon.

“Get up and open this portal again.” She said.

I pushed myself up on my trembling legs and walked slowly over to the closed portal and opened them again.

That was when I felt winded almost collapsing. I checked my stats and noticed my mana was at 0% and my hp was at 25%.

“Damn.. I overused mana.” I mutter. “Florista… help me through before it closes. I’m… out of mana.” I said.

Moving quickly she grabbed me and picked me up and walked out letting the portal close completely.

Through my hive mind I tell the striders to return home and notice how a portal opens up for them but it didn’t consume mana which meant it was something the hive dimension did on its own.

I walk to the chair I sat at before and pull out my copy of ‘The Bugmen’. Flipping to the skill zone and start reading through. There were many things on bug breeding but I skimmed through. I kept looking until I finally found it. In the section where it tells about entering the hive world themselves it mentioned the Wilderness Zone

Wilderness Zone

It is a unique region within our body. In the most basic form it is a dark dimly lit wasteland with no life. The sun in this place is in permanent eclipse and no day and night cycle exists.

This place would be where we would gather hundreds and thousands of animals and plants so that our races would have their own world to hunt in. It is safer to hunt in this place but monsters will also appear but not under the will of the owner. Within the body of the *** Tribe, ‘The power’ made this area in the inner heart of the owner of the body. Besides the animals and monsters that are born here, the nightmares of the wielder of ‘The power’ will be born in physical bodies here.

During ‘The Eclipse’ Era of this area the nightmares are weak even though darkness covers the plains. They appear as weak shadow specters. To end this perpetual darkness the owner of ‘The Power’ must travel personally into the heart of the Wilderness Zone and kill his worst nightmare.

Normal level of this monster is always 7 levels above the owner of ‘the Power’.

Suggested you breed a small army of bugs while remaining low leveled before taking on your nightmare and prepare mentally for this.

The result of killing the nightmare would end ‘The Eclipse’ in the wilderness zone making it possible to introduce vegetation and small animals.

…

It continued on but what I needed to know was already read.

I knew because of this.

Class Quest:

War against your nightmare

By reading the book about your class, you have discovered that the unique land “Wilderness Zone” is covered in permanent darkness and life can’t grow because your own nightmares don’t allow the sunlight to reach the ground.

Difficulty:

Class Quest

Reward:

Upgrade to Wilderness Zone, Conquer fears

Failure:

None

Success:

Kill Nightmare

I froze up after I saw this actually. Sweat gathered on my forehead and my body started shaking thinking of what I would have to fight.

“Hey… Leon… HEY!” Flor suddenly shouted.

A snapped out of it but not before jumping in fright.

“What is going on?! You were shaking like that time the power failed in the building and when the generators turned on you were on the ground crying already, what happened?” She asked.

Not wanting to say anything and just breath several times, I point to the passage and pass it to her.

I just sit with my head bent over while breathing several deep breaths pushing the thought out before going to Thomas’s desk and looking through it and finding a few extra candles. I take them out and light them making the area a bit brighter.

“No wonder… to fight your worst nightmare means your biggest fear. For you it's darkness right?” She asked.

I nod.

“I will need to find a specific bug or weapon for this. Maybe light magic but even then I don’t know if my fear will allow me to calmly deal with this.” I said.

“Specific bug… Fireflies?” Flor said.

“No, fireflies would only be useful for combat while it’s in its pupa stage. As soon as it becomes an adult it will only think of reproduction. It would take too long to try and fix that so I won’t bother. I may need to create magic using bugs because darkness would be incorpale like a phantom or something.” I said.

It made sense to work on magic if the creature you face doesn’t have a true body. Truthfully even with magic, fireflies would be useless because the lights they produce are made from chemical reactions in two sections of its lower abdomen. This would mean it would have fire magic instead of light magic maybe.

“Well, I don’t plan to do much with this at the moment. My bugs are too few and too weak at the moment. It says to make a small army but I don’t have more than a small platoon.” I say and she agrees.

“You should work on that though. What bug species do you have at the moment?”

I pull out the written list of them and hand it to her while summoning one of each for her to see.

“Yeah, you need to have them grow a lot. Bug breeding is a strange thing.” She says.

“I think it’s much simpler than it looks.” I tell her. She tilts her head confused but I continue. “The bugs have genetics integrated into them, I think all animals and monsters do. If I order them, ‘The bug with the highest strength potential’ even if they have the same stats one of them will come forth because his genetic potential is best.” I tell her.

She looked rather stunned by this but then seemed to accept it better. The reasoning she told me.

“That makes sense, bugs are nearly mindless so following instincts and orders from a hive mind it would know if it’s stronger in one way or another.” She says. “Well, I will get back to work, you should find something to do yourself.”

It was rather mean to just brush it off but whatever.

I opened the window and looked out at the town that had fire lamps lit all around but still was really dark.

I feel all the bugs and begin to isolate all the strongest ones, at least those that were in large numbers.

The bugs that laid eggs still haven’t hatched so I couldn’t do much but those that laid larva I had the best one breed and had them fly out and find random corpses before returning.

Once the bugs were released I just waited and slowly the hive mind grew by several dozens.

I recalled the adults and just went to rest in my seat.

In the morning Flor woke me up with Thomas looking down on us.

“Got sleepy tonight huh? Here.” he said and handed over the small sum for the normal night's work before walking off.

“Did anything interesting happen?” I ask.

“I learned Herblore and leveled up alchemy and blacksmithing by studying the books on them. Besides that nothing out of what we explored last night.” She said.

I nod and stretch hearing several bones pop and crack as I stretch.

I get up and go to the window. I release my bugs and order them to pick up the cocoons for the bugs that entered metamorphosis. I checked the stats and saw that the new generation had 0.6 points higher in the stats they were bred to enhance than before.

They were adapting fast to the changes. When I get it perfectly to 1 stat above the normal one then I will begin crossing them.

I could already see the difference in each one. Strength bugs were bigger and bulkier, Agility ones were slender and agile, ones made from Endurance were making thicker exoskeletons, Dexterity didn’t show anything that I could see with the naked eye as did Int and Wis. Though through the hive mind I could feel the Wis ones had muddled minds which showed they were developing a mind but were too dumb and lacked Int to compliment their wisdom.

“Won’t be long until I start mixing.” I thought.

I look at the main mission for the bug situation.

Quest:

Bug Invasion

You have found that the rapid expansion caused by the presence of the players who made the land safer caused the bugs that lived in the forests and lived off the blood of the monsters to migrate into the city where there are people. The problems have begun to appear. The bugs besides being annoying some even hold diseases that have begun to spread through the city.

If the problem isn’t handled or controlled eventually an epidemic could happen.

Difficulty:

D

Reward:

Unknown

Requirements:

Find a way to control/exterminate the bug population in the city. Find a cure for the various diseases the bugs are spreading.

Time limit:

5 Months 2 weeks if left unchanged

Failure:

Epidemic spreads to everyone. You ignore the quest, time limit ends.

Success:

Find the culprits.

The time has gone up by a month and two weeks which is a good time but that equates to cleaning up 6-8 alleyways in a town that is infested with bugs where the slums form a ring around the city.

I might have to work at night using the Beetles as a clean up squad to pull the bodies into the hive and then during the day I walk around and have the female Biting Midges kill off adult bugs.

I still need to find who is killing all the animals because I know thieves wouldn’t do it knowing that it would cause problems unless they wanted that result but no corpses had stab wounds so I doubt it.

The biting Midges are still small in number so I release those and order them to look for larva and other insects that aren’t my own to kill.

I do the same for the blow flies and blood suckers telling them to kill and eat wild bugs.

With nothing left to do I leave the library and go to the training hall to train my Glaive mastery so I can fight my nightmares or I won’t be able to benefit from the wilderness zone ever.