Adon heard and felt, rather than saw, as the wasps attacked him.

Their stingers stabbed and jabbed and careened off of his armor like so many bullets striking a thick steel plate. Some of them whizzed by, but most of them struck home without penetrating.

The attacks were utterly harmless—for now. In fact, to the extent that they were damaging, they were only harming the wasps. Adon felt some of his venom spines impale the creatures he could not see and break off inside their bodies.

Still, he knew that his situation was potentially very dangerous. The Queen could afford to spend as many wasp lives as she had available, as long as she forced Adon to burn through his Mana reserves before she lost her whole colony. She had apparently decided it was worth gambling her entire species on killing Adon.

I have to come up with a solution to destroying these things before I run out of Mana or they find a way to hurt me. The expenditure of all his Mana seemed less of an immediate danger than the wasps coming up with some weapon to penetrate his armor that he had not seen before. Poisonous gas, or even just foul-smelling gas, was the first idea that came to mind for how he would want to fight a creature like himself. He suspected his Mana-infused exoskeleton would hold up well even against acid, though it was hard to be certain, having never faced it.

But the wasps—really the Queen, since she seemed to be the only brain behind the swarm—would have to take time to come up with possible countermeasures to Adon. Just as he needed time to find a counter to her illusions.

Adon sidestepped as he heard the sound of buzzing moving in on his right side, and he managed to reach out and grasp hold of a thin membrane—a wing—and rip it free from the body. He heard the wasp fall somewhere and skid to a stop on the rooftop, but he still could not see its body.

That’s it, he decided, resuming his train of thought. I need to think faster.

He reached out to the power in the darkness again. Mental magic.

As he found the source of the ability, a half dozen stingers struck Adon on three sides and glanced off, but he ignored them this time. His focus had shifted completely to the task of destroying his enemies. With his current level of defense, dodging did not appear to be necessary to that process right now.

With his body moving on autopilot and only play-acting at fighting the wasps, Adon’s mind was free. He began analyzing the situation at incredible speed.

Around sixty enemies total are still in the air, judging from the sound of buzzing. The bodyguards are throwing the sound off slightly. Their wings are significantly larger and therefore noticeably louder. I can’t see any of their real bodies based on the way the sound is carrying. Can’t trust my eyes at all except possibly to tell me where the edge of the roof is. Even that might be dubious, since the one wasp whose wings I ripped off was still out of view when it hit the rooftop.

He continued tanking attacks as his mind raced, and occasionally struck back at his attackers. Ripping off a wing here, or a leg there. A few times, he got lucky and grabbed a wasp’s head. They popped off easily when he could actually get a grip on them. But it was slow going.

I think it’s likely that only the Queen has magic. If it wasn’t that way, they would be reinforcing their bodies to take my attacks without being dismembered—or even reinforcing their stingers to penetrate my exoskeleton. There’s no point in sending dozens of wasps to their deaths when you could win without making that kind of sacrifice.

The Queen herself isn’t approaching me even though she can hide her appearance with magic, because she’s scared to get into close quarters. She’s probably physically weaker than me even though she’s so big. It’s also likely that she lived her last life as a human. If her life was anything like mine, she’d have been a lot more sheltered as a human. Maybe she’s reluctant to get her hands dirty, like I was just after I hatched. She claimed she’s had a hard time in this life, but I already know she’s a liar. Maybe she was born a queen rather than becoming one. If she hasn’t needed to fight much since creating all these minions, it would make sense that she doesn’t have the courage to do it now.

He shook his head slightly. Her motivations don’t matter that much. I only need to know information that helps me end the fight. The only way I can win is to find a way to locate the wasps and tear them up. I can’t aim my spines if I don’t know where they are. So how do I fix that problem…? My sense of smell isn’t good enough to locate them with. My hearing tells me where they are, but only vaguely. I wouldn’t even know which end of the body I was attacking. But that might be enough. If I could hit their wings using my hearing—those are the parts that make that horrible buzzing sound—then I could ground them. It would make locating each wasp and finishing them off much easier if they could only move along two dimensions. Flying enemies are the worst!

He focused on his sense of hearing for a moment and tried to locate the wasps by sound, but the only ones he could easily pinpoint were those who kept coming at him directly. He tore the nearest one in half.

Not nearly good enough targeting from just using my hearing. I would just waste all my spines.

He began to feel frustration, but his mind simmered down much more quickly under the influence of his Mana. Mental magic seemed to be a powerful focuser of the mind.

Wait. Maybe that’s it! What about using mental magic? Maybe with mental magic and Telepathy, I can do something like what I did before. Connect to a large number of wasps at once. I wouldn’t need to know where they are to knock them down again, right?

That would still leave the problem of killing them once they were down, though. He had already seen that the effects of his mental attack were temporary for at least some of the wasps. Others, he knew, had died from it, but he had not verified this beyond the small group that had been holding him when he lashed out.

Stolen story; please report.

I can’t rely on it to be fatal, though. Only to knock them down for a bit, assuming the Queen doesn’t have some way of reinforcing their minds or blocking them from me.

But if he couldn’t see the wasps, he wouldn’t be able to take advantage of their temporary incapacity properly. They would be back in the air a minute or two later, and he’d have only burned through some of his Mana.

Do I have to kill the Queen before I can finish off the rest of her swarm? Since she’s hanging back, that could be even more troublesome than just trying to kill the rest of the wasps when they come and attack me. At least they’re voluntarily exposing themselves to danger.

His mind finally hit on an idea that felt promising.

If I can attack them with Telepathy and mental magic, maybe I can use it to track where they are.

He activated Telepathy and focused externally, then.

Reaching out with his mind. He felt them all around him. The minds of life forms he could try to converse with if he chose. With mental magic, the simple detection of their presences sharpened into something more specific. Something tangible. Deadly useful. A slowly forming pattern of mental activity that gave him an indicator in his mind’s eye of where each enemy was.

Each life form’s brain activity was like a bright light in the darkness. Suddenly Adon had a map to the stars. The horde of wasps desperately trying to kill him formed constellations, and the beauty of the patterns of existence struck him as magnificent as he traced them through the air.

In the back, behind almost all of the other points of light, he sensed a much brighter light than the others. If the average wasp was a distant star, this one was like the sun.

The Queen. Telepathically coordinating all her children and shielding them with illusions requires a lot of mental effort. She’s doing more than anyone else to make their fight possible. I suppose I might have underestimated her resolve. Maybe she’s hanging back because she’s using all her mental energy being the brains of their side… Anyway, more importantly, I can pinpoint where she is now.

But further examining the arrays of other wasps laid out in between him and their ruler, he realized that he would not reach the Queen if he went straight for her now. They were too well positioned to defend her.

She thought of everything. She even foresaw that I might penetrate her illusions somehow. She’ll still have the royal guards beside her too. He could see the pattern of dots around the Queen’s radiance. That could only be the wasps she most trusted to defend her. That would explain why the smaller, weaker wasps are the only ones that have been attacking me. She fundamentally cares more about her own survival than she does my defeat. So much so that she’s sabotaging her own best chance of killing me by keeping the strongest ones guarding her instead of attacking. It might be a smart calculation and not just her trying to avoid death at the expense of her children. After all, the life of the colony is the Queen, right?

Adon realized that even now, when the Queen had shown that she was thoroughly beyond reason, he was trying to see things from her point of view. Trying to make sense of her.

Just stop, he told himself. Kill them. You already have the method.

Adon used his awareness of where the closest wasps—charging straight at him through the air—were. He pointed his spines and fired a half dozen. He observed as the brains continued moving forward, clearly no longer in precise control of their flight paths, and careened over the edge of the palace roof.

Then he pointed the remainder of his spines toward the largest body of enemies. He wanted to speed run the rest of this fight, before the Queen found some way to counter him. He pushed Mana into his spines to enhance their power and speed.

And he fired.

Over a hundred spines flee from Adon’s body, leaving his front and middle completely naked. Dozens of the lights he had detected flickered out in an instant. He could tell the spines were continuing forward beyond that, penetrating into further back wasps’ bodies, because additional stars in his map of the darkness tumbled from the sky. Most of them were also snuffed out in the ensuing moments.

Although the Queen had hidden her children with an illusion and only sent handfuls to fight Adon at a time, she had kept the bulk of them massed together. A fatal mistake.

Adon counted just under twenty wasps still airborne after his attack, including the Queen and her guards.

And finally the guards leaped into action. Adon could almost see the order leave the Queen’s mind. The mental activity she was generating noticeably decreased.

Every wasp but the Queen reappeared in Adon’s view. Only the Queen was hidden behind illusion now.

The remainder of the colony hurtled towards Adon, moving as one wave of chitinous mass.

But it would not be enough, he knew. Adon ran forward to meet them. He ripped the closest two in half, turned and shot spines from his rear at the next three, and then he was engaged with the royal guards.

Unlike the larger body of supporters, they took more than a few spines to kill.

The first two latched onto him and began jabbing him hard with their stingers. Adon was surprised to find that he felt it, though his Mana had not yet run out. It was beginning to get low, but he still had enough to carry out his ongoing defense.

Adon ripped and tore with his superior Strength, and one of the guards fell, missing the lower third of its body, but two more took its place.

Stingers struck the same spots over and over again, leaving painful dents in the armor that they could not quite penetrate.

Adon fired the remainder of his spines, which were mostly useless since they were not imbued with Mana. One of the guards fell. The other two that were upon him slowed for a moment.

He ripped off a head.

Then one of the last couple of royal guards stabbed him in a dented place, and Adon felt searing agony tear through his body.

Fuck! Oww. Goddess, why did you make wasps?!

Adon bit off the offending stinger, and then he threw off the guards still on top of him and dashed at the Queen.

The sudden lunging movement clearly took her off guard. There was a moment where she hesitated, remained still, clearly hoped that he was just trying to escape her guards. Then she tried to fly out of range, but it was too late. He gripped her bottom legs with his forelimbs, held her steady, and finally stabbed into her abdomen with his mandibles.

Her hesitation had killed her.

Adon injected acid into her body through his mandibles, and she spasmed in shock and obvious pain. The sound of buzzing from her body went silent as the Queen’s wings stopped moving.

Then the caterpillar and the wasp tumbled together toward the ground.