Derrick gripped the squirming insect tightly, easily preventing it from escaping his grasp reaching anywhere it might do actual damage. His gauntlet was far too armored for the oversized bee to damage him, despite its steel strong carapace and stinger.
The Hunter's attention was split between the insect in his hand and the insect on the tree beside him. The latter wasn't attacking him yet, though it didn't look happy.
Should he kill it? It was annoying to have to split his attention like this when their was such an interesting prize in his hand.
“Mathew?” he called out. Not taking his eyes off the buzzing insect to look for his ally.
“Yes?” came the hesitant reply. No doubt his allies were a bit concerned about being surrounded by an unknown number of venomous hostiles. The normal giant bees, the ones without aurilin, were still more confused than angry. Derrick was ninety percent sure he could use auril pulses to knock anything that small out of the sky if he had too. That would cost him a lot of auril before he cleared the area though.
“If that one moves, shoot it.” Derrick stated. The other Hunter was a good enough shot that he could probably snipe the bee out of the air if it attacked. And if he couldn't? Well, he'd taken dumber risks and survived.
His Quantum Awareness was still whispering in his ear, letting him know that these two bees were communicating with something so closely he could feel its awareness through them. This was fascinating but not unprecedented. It was how the Spore Tyrants worked, after all. If anything this was a much cruder version of that. Which made it much more valuable to him as a place to start.
Banishing any distractions, Derrick calmed himself and concentrated on the complicated world of auril. On the dancing patterns of that strange energy inside himself. The deep currents of it that flowed from his auril heart and the subtle weavings that flowed along his skin. His numerous scars that now healed tough and red.
First, he sent another wave of calm towards his tiny prisoner. It seemed to work, its simple mind was easily tricked into docility. How much of an attention span did a bee have anyway?
It was nice to be dealing with actual living things again. Trying to fight the Rebel Instruments had been like fighting half blind and with one arm tied behind his back.
His trump card, Canvas manna was too unpredictable to be much use. He much preferred auril, it was fiendishly complicated but it did follow a clear set of rules. Rules that could be learned through examination and experimentation.
He focused entirely on his target. A tiny body containing less than a tenth of his own aurilin. Yes, he could feel it thanks to his Quantum Awareness. That trait highlighted the auril tendrils that danced across the space between this bee and its... auril symbiote.
Derrick felt himself become enchanted with it. It was a beautiful thing. Similar in nature to what he'd felt from Spore Tyrant's but much simpler... Not as simple as he'd thought actually, it was also intuitive to him in a way that the alien's power wasn't. Easier to understand because this was an ability born of something from this world. Humanity's world.
He moved past just observation and actively invaded his target with his own auril. Not hurting it but exploring it deeply.
Once more it squirmed in his hand. Not of its own volition, but because of a command by the mind behind its own. A very simple command, he felt. This was no commanding genius. When it sent it's next command and his prisoner responded, Derrick had laced the response with his own auril. Something he hoped would let out a weak pulse.
No luck, the second mind wasn't that easily fooled. The defences tear his parasitic auril apart easily and fast enough he's guess it was an automatic response. So he did it again, slightly adjusting his auril. And again when that failed. And again when that failed.
Until he succeeded and discovered exactly what he'd thought. It was another bee of course, the queen bee obviously. Deep below the ground it was nestled safely as it fed on the flesh of the Spore Tyrant next to it.
With its defences defeated, Derrick easily calmed the insect winged monarch down. There, crisis averted. He and his allies would be safe now. He smiled to himself. Now he had time to play around.
Gently, he examined everything. His auril dancing along with every pattern it could find. The queen's defences, her commands and they pattern he identified as related to growth.
Those were not unlike the ones used by the Grey Legion. Coincidence? They did the same thing as what he'd seen in Vanguards. Patterns that catalyzed growth and density, that allowed natural processes to break the limits of what they could do in terms of flesh and armor.
Once that was done, he let out another pulse and found the Spore Tyrant Node.
It was a weakened and boring thing. Barely worth examination, shredded and dying.
This was not a dungeon he saw, though the Inoculated insects were taking auril from the Spore Tyrant. They were simply prolonging its death, not preserving it like the System could do with the help of a Warden Crusader.
They would extract some extra aurilin before it died true, but a very limited amount.
Was that what these creatures were for? A Hollow Majesty's attempt to gather aurilin? That was actually very impressive, he admitted. Much smarter than running around fighting the Spore Tyrant's with an axe and a can do attitude.
Noble Virulence had been all about doing the opposite of creating more aurilin on Earth though. Was this an attempt to steal aurilin before human Users could get to it? That seemed like a stupid strategy for what was clearly a very smart entity. Even if the creator of these insects was destroying the aurilin they gathered, it was a mind boggling waste of resources.
No, this had to have some other point. The most obvious guess was that the bees were the point, not the aurilin. The aurilin just helped them achieve their goal, which was to find and kill Spore Tyrant node's.
Derrick fell deeper into examination. The aurilin was the only clue he had to the purpose of all this. The insects didn't come up with a Style on their own. No, it was given to them and bound to their nature in a similar way to how Grey Legion did so. He'd examined enough Grey Legion hearts that he knew what to look for. The subtle traces their creator left of its own nature on its creations.
Prosperity, cleansing and observation were the commands he felt. They tasted odd, yet he recognized something human in their making. Observation was an odd one. Normally it should be a simple thing, yet it was far more complex than it should be. Even considering the bee's ability to see through the eyes of its warriors by sending packets of dense aurilin. There would be more to it. Had to be more to it.
He hesitated for a second, then went deeper.
Yes, the pulses between the bees were only half of it, there was something else here. A pulse of auril revealed nothing at all. Yet, that told him something too. He was not ignorant of the ways things hid from aurilin. First he checked for auril based defences, but if they existed they were too powerful for him to detect.
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Ah, manna. The bee had a manna hub in it's head. He could feel the tiny empty space now that he was looking for it. A speck of void where living flesh should be.
There was scarring around it, he noted. Something implanted, rather than grown. Obnoxiously crude compared to the elegance of the rest of the work he’d seen.
What to do now? The queen bee was not under his control, merely rendered passive. He could not bring it up to the surface for closer examination and he could not reach anywhere near that far with his manna. Unless, the manna core that was feeding the hub was up here, this was a dead end.
He pulsed once more, looking for nothingness. He didn't find it.
Well, if he couldn't study the manna core, he could study how it interacted with auril. It was a very subtle change but he could detect something happening. A twist to the auril before it vanished into the core. Fascinated, he studied it for what felt like an eternity. Until he had seen all there was to see, and was left disappointed at the mystery.
Was this the end? He didn't want it to be. He wanted to explore more. He felt pushed to do so, could feel pressure growing with every beat of his heart. His aurlin was thriving. It demanded to be used. So he did.
If he'd learned all he could from the insects below, that still left two auril using creatures on the surface to learn from. He could see them with aurlin but could not touch them like he was was the bees. Not yet. It was possible, he realized. The one was using a Style based on his own, and so was susceptible. It would almost invite him in. The other was just weak, he thought contemptuously, their style of rigid and flawed design. He had already spent hours examining it too.
It was the most natural thing in the world to infiltrate their auril. His own Auril Style shivered in excitement as it reached out. He could feel it grow and solidify as contact was made. Even as the hand on his shoulder rested firmly, two more invisible limbs reached out for his allies.
They didn't even seem to notice. At least until he blasted auril through them, using them as routers for a pulse. A sadly inefficient process. He was limited to a fraction of their own auril limits, which were already less than his own. Easier to just move to them and pulse. It didn't seem like the kind of problem he could fix with further study, simply a limit of what aurilin could do.
His subjects had become aware of his hijacking. This apparently, excited them. He could feel their hearts frantic beat. So, while studying everything, he calmed them.
Derrick frowned. He'd calmed them. Something about that felt wrong. Very wrong as it brought back an echo of an event that defined his auril. His stomach turned as his enthusiasm died. A moment of introspection was all it took to break the spell he'd cast on himself.
He felt something shift inside him. A possibility denied while another became more defined, filling the space his rejection had created.
Fuck. He'd gone full Purple Man there for a minute. Actually, he considered, he'd gone full Grey Legion. That had to be where those instincts had come from.
Derick opened his eyes and let the bee in his hand fly off. He watched it make a beeline for the safety of the hive. Then he forced himself to face the two other Users there with him.
“What the hell, was that?” Sam asked, Mathew looming silently behind her. There was a complicated look on her face. It was at least partially fear, Derrick guessed.
Derrick tried to think of how to answer that.
“I apologize for what I just did,” Derrick said. “I get a little too into studying auril. I hit you with what I was doing to our buzzing friends over there. I was pretty out of it.”
“That's obvious, you've been sitting there for over an hour now.” Mathew said calmly. Derrick eyed him. Was he really as unbothered as he appeared? No, more likely he was keeping his concerns to himself. Fair enough, Derrick would just have to make sure not to repeat the incident.
“That didn't hurt either of you?” Derrick pressed. He was pretty sure he hadn't but it was important to be sure.
“Fine, just startled.” Mathew answered with a frown. “So that's the auril sensitivity bogeyman people talk about. I can see why it would upset people. At least tell you learned something important while you were sitting around.”
“What's this?” Sam asked. “What did you just do? I could barely follow anything you were doing.”
So, the many things Sam was ignorant of included auril sensitivity, how predictable.
“Explanations can wait for the hike back,” Derrick said. “We should get a move on, it's likely we were detected. I felt a manna device down there. It has got to be some kind of sensor. Whatever created these guys might not love my tinkering with them.”
“That's it?” Sam asked suspiciously. “Were just going to leave these monsters out here? Letting them breed an army? Does that really seem like a good idea to you?”
“They don't seem like much of a threat,” Mathew argued while watching one buzz overhead. “A bit grating on the ears, but no worse than how deadly silent it is out here.”
“They're giant bees,” she responded slowly. “Would you want to like, raise your kids near them?”
“I'm a Hunter, not an Exterminator. Besides, they eat Spore Tyrants,” Derrick said. “Small ones at least. It's why they're here. There was one under that hill. If we had the Users to safely cleanse the countryside of both the bees and any other nodes that are around, I would be tempted to fight them. Lacking anywhere near enough Users for that, I'll let them fight it out for now at least.”
“I'm one hundred percent on team bee then,” Mathew said with a grimace, no doubt remembering the hell Spore Tyrant's made of West Hills. Even Sam nodded along with that, Dewport had it worse, at least when it came to Spore Tyrants.
Universal Support System
Mission complete:
+310 points for successfully investigating altered wildlife (Apoidea)
A simple reward for a simple mission. Considering he had managed to learn a bit more about auril, he was more than happy with a few points as the official reward for the mission.
“Right, so let's get going,” Derick said and rose to his feet.
----------------------------------------
It was long and mostly boring slog back to the spot they had agreed to meet Breakneck at. They encountered no more mutant wildlife. Although Derrick did see flashes of what could be worm-like creatures below the ground. He kept that to himself though. He wasn't even sure it hadn't just been roots. Auril senses basically just gave flashes of shapes and all the life around him was confusing.
Arriving at the meetup location, it became immediately obvious that Meg and her group had not made it back yet. The Tempests they had sent to West Hills with the wounded were back though, with a few extra thrown in as well.
He wasn't going to complain but the new Tempests were unmarked. Meaning they belonged to neither breakneck or Red Works. Adding a third commander to this army would be a pain in the ass.
The trio walked out the bushes without fanfare, recognizing a Red Works User standing guard. They were of course, immediately recognized and the situation was explained to him.
It turned out that his worries were unfounded. While the Tempests were on loan, the Users were Red Works employees and a small group of other Users that had accepted a mission from the System to head out with them. Those Users were drawn from the militia and Teslaforce but had all agreed to work under him for the duration. They almost seemed enthusiastic about it. Especially the militia User, which surprised him.
Apparently, there had been some mild grumbling at how safe their bosses were playing it. If Red Works or Breakneck had failed with their push, Derrick was sure they would be thinking differently, but his and Meg's success meant most Users saw their ambitious missions as the right call.
That made Derrick smile. Served the old timers that ran the militia right. He imagined they might even be forced to get off their asses if he succeeded in this mission. Especially if he treated these dissenters well enough.
All in all, they had replaced their loses and then some. The best part was that this meant that the System was taking this mission seriously. He could count on it offering more reinforcements if they became necessary.
With the bees out of the way, it seemed like things were back on track.
“Is there anything else I should know about?” he asked his employee after they'd gone over the resumes of the new additions. “Any word from Breakneck?”
The trio hadn't taken any communication equipment with them on their mission, in case it could be tracked, so they hadn't been in communication with anybody. It was a bit worrying that Breakneck wasn't here yet.
“They’re fine,” his subordinate replied, with a hint of nervousness. “We’ve been in communication with them for an hour. I don’t know the details, but It seems like they never even found the Rebel Instruments. They’re late because they keep getting mobbed by local survivors.”
A common problem. Human’s were better at surviving than you’d expect. You couldn’t turn over a rock without finding some group of stragglers.
What was the nervousness about though? Derrick was hardly a strict boss, except when it came to training and actual combat. He’s cultivated a reputation for fairness so why would…
He heard an odd click from behind. It was a very recognizable sound to his enhanced hearing but so out of place he had to look to the source of it.
It was he click of high heels on a hard surface. He let out a pulse of auril before he managed to turn his head. It confirmed his suspicions.
“How dare you try to escape,” Shalka the Velorie exclaimed loudly enough that every nearby User could hear. “Running off on a dangerous mission without saying goodbye? Unexceptable, your good looks only go so far.”