A Hive of Bone and Chitin [A Biomancy and Hivemind Litrpg Adventure]

The sun refused to set.

The great spiralling structure of limestone was bathed in the heat of day, numerous spires and staircases glinting in the eternal day while heat rose steadily. The walls of the structure were not solid, instead they had railings on overhanging platforms and great windows only divided by thin non-continuous columns with spiralling engravings snaking across them. Hundreds of platforms, all suspended in the air around a central disk, spun slowly as the structure drilled upwards towards the heavens. Far above the disk, something danced. It resembled neither a dragon nor something that was not a dragon. It danced in revelry, sparks of energy violently lancing out from it with very motion, every contortion and every permutation of the thing. The energy was neither lightning nor fire, and yet it was both, but it sparkled like the ocean reflecting the sun.

The thing thrashed and danced as the great tower rose towards the sky. The outermost platforms curled like claws and columns grinded against one another until there was a sphere. A sphere with a shapeless godling caged within. The godling's movements grew more and more erratic, faster, more desperate, as it tried in futility to escape. The bursts of energy grew brighter until it was not a godling that was captured in that tower, but a second sun. A sun that refused to set. The heat was so high as to char the ground black and make the air shimmer even as that frail-looking limestone structure remained unblemished. Then it changed. The gold turned black and the sphere started pulsing like a heartbeat. A hole in the world. A hole that had been torn into the very fabric of reality to harness the raw potential that could have eventually coalesced into an unborn universe. Unformed Chaos

An enormous beam of gold shot into the sky, somehow dwarfing the already massive structure. Then it split into six that each went in a different direction. Beyond the horizon, beyond the reach of mortals. I followed one of the beams to its destination. It went on for so long, so far that I was sure it would have travelled multiple times across the Earth at those speeds, if it were Earth. I was not on Earth but it was repeating. I was seeing the same landmasses cycling beneath me as it made rounds across the world. Desert, tundra, ocean, forest, sea, desert, tundra, ocean, forest, sea, desert. At the end of each lap, one of the other beams joined up with mine and then finally, when all six had recombined into one, it reached its destination. The tower again. There was something else there now. A new structure. It was a receptacle. Another sphere. It received the energy eagerly and I watched as the golden light turned red, then blue, then the deepest purple before finally settling on maroon. A second sphere of maroon pulsed within the receptacle and a narrow ray of light burst forth. I now knew what I was looking at.

A familiar blue light and a hulking mass that my mind refused to collate into one. I could look at a smaller area and make out pincers or spikes but never the whole thing, never how everything connected. My mind struggled to reconcile the whole but it slipped away every time I tried. It didn't hurt, it didn't even confuse me, it was like my memory simply erased itself whenever I was coming close to that point.

The beam met the Third Calamity and I woke up.

Waking up, I checked the time. Great. I was up before dawn. I was going to have a migraine all day now unless I manage to catch up on my sleep. Another dream. I was having so many of these fragments of the Third Calamity's memories lately and yet She never spoke to me directly in them. Always flashes of the past, a story lasting over a millenia and yet only presented in flashes of memory.

A glass of poison heavily diluted in water that was uncomfortably warm later, I plopped myself back into my bed and closed my eyes, ignoring the light cramps that Poison Cultivation had left me with. I tried to go back to sleep but I couldn't. I was too well rested, too energetic physically even as my mind was tired. It was always a bit tired now: so many things that it had to monitor.

With nothing else to do, I let my mind wander across my swarm until I found something that seemed vaguely interesting.

One expected outcome of the quarantine was that the Hunter's Guild had not been able to cull the wild beasts around the city and so, as it was the nature of such things to do, we had another problem on top of the gang war, the insane dragon, and the impending economic collapse. Wild monsters that were just too problematic to be allowed to breed and move any closer to the city.

Back on Earth, collapse didn't happen immediately. I didn't go from living in an apartment to being a refugee after one event. It was slow. Things become slightly more expensive and slightly worse quality with each passing day, sometimes the days would get just a tad hotter, one day you would revisit the beach to find that the sea had taken more of it than you remember. You would find yourself guarding what you have with jealousy, losing the implicit assumption of security that you had held on to. Stories, ads, media, all of them told stories but those changed. No longer were they pretending that it was just a matter of your own skill that made you different from the rich, no longer was any notion of joining them sold to you. Advertisements changed from promising a better life to maintaining what you already had, and then to mitigating how much worse you could be, and then there was no one with the time left to hear those stories at all. Small things like that, compounding over days, weeks, months, years and decades until one day the idle talks about moving elsewhere were no longer idle and a necessity. Until you are on the other side of the barbed wire fence.

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New Delport didn't feel like it was dying like that, but the parallels were uncomfortable nonetheless. But I digress, the point was that the latest straws on the proverbial camel's back were packs of monsters that had found their way into the perimeter established by the council after killing a few Hunter guilders and people were being paid to end them all.

Medea and Vespia had been killing monsters all day, every day for half a Dellish week and now, finally, the tide was abating. Medea wasn't in combat at the moment, rather just surveying the forest from above in search of a good target for consumption. It had things under control even if it hadn't evolved lately; the only real difference since I left Mitria's clinic being the mouth tendrils having sharp speartips at their ends and that change was not even instigated by consumption.

'Mother.' It sent an acknowledgement of my mental presence that I reciprocated. I left Medea to its devices and switched over to a lone wasp. Vespia, that was my name for the primary wasp queen in my swarm, was painful to possess directly because of how many subordinates she was constantly controlling. Even with Vespia handling it mostly by herself, I had a constant mild migraine.

The wasp flew away from the rest of the swarm and perched in the grass. Its vision was wide like Medea's but just like any other non-spider-scorpion insect, terrible as far as resolution went. A pulse of mana fixed them a bit so that I could see the battle unfolding before me. Two giants clashed.

One was a large legged serpentine reptile with a mane of smaller vestigial snake heads. One of those monsters that did not have much except raw physicality going for them. The other was smaller but it rippled as if life was squirming underneath the rotten black hide. Veins of a glistening dark substance covered most of its body. It resembled a tusked boar in the most rudimentary fashion possible, with bear-like musculature. Vespia's current host.

The boar swiped with a claw that tore open shallow gashes on the scaled reptile's neck even as it wrapped itself around Vespia's legs. The reptile was blind, eyes stung and nibbled away to oblivion by black wasps that were now squirming in empty eye sockets, trying to get to the reptile's brain to finish colonizing it. Some flew into its maw where they melted from the acidic saliva before they could create a suffocating blockage. Even when blinded and injured, the reptile was stronger and it was ripping off chunks with its own claws and maw. Flesh fell and then exploded into life as wasps emerged from them to rejoin the fray. Others crawled over wounds and melded together to seal them with that glistening black substance. Although she was taking more damage then she was inflicting, Vespia was also healing through it as her host birthed hundreds of wasps a second and sacrificed them just as freely to find every orifice, every crevice, and every injury. Steam rose as it heated up from the accelerated life cycles of its parasite. Slowly but surely, the reptile was being chipped away at.

Then things changed. The reptile opened its maw as wide as it could and spat out an enormous ball of acid. The sound of sizzling flesh filled the air as a hole twice the size of my head melted clean through Vespia. The creature began tearing at Vespia with wild abandon. My lone observer wasp could see tiny bodies squirming at the edges of the hole as it closed, new wasps merging into the shape of the organs that should have been.

Vespia thrust one leg into the mouth of the tiring reptile and let it disintegrate. Flesh sizzled and the serpentine creature thrashed and rolled but it was trapped, too tightly coiled around a creature that was not going to let go now. The reptile slowed as oxygen ran out and then it was gone. The wasps buzzed, the debilitating sound of their wings making me feel for a moment; Vespia stood motionless, steam hissing as its host slowed.

My observer flew closer and I focused all my attention to the scene before it. Every time I saw this process, I felt I was closer to understanding what the hell was going on with Vespia. Closer to bridging that seemingly insurmountable incompatibility between my two strongest fighters. Selene didn't count. I had to temporarily make the moth clinically dead to transfer the mantle of Swarm General to the wasp but it was worth it. So worth it. Sure the wasp hadn't had a tier up yet but it was only a matter of time.

The host moved again. Not as it had, no, it turned into an animated puddle of organs, moving only because of the infection that was now breaking it down to food. It slithered until it was touching the dead reptile. Steam rose again, even more intensely until the puddle turned into a cloud, a cloud of flying darkness that carried within it flesh, muscles, bones, organs, and more, all intact in a structure that was only alive in the most charitable interpretation of the word. Amidst the buzz of countless wasp wings flapping in unison, and mandibles chittering in equal parts hunger and triumph, a smaller cloud broke off and landed on the reptile and a new set of external black veins slithered across its body. Its body opened up like a zipper, spilling forth even more wasps. The clouds merged and everything sealed itself again. Eye sockets writhed and new eyes, as black as the shell of the wasps, grew within them. Finally, a pale white dot of light lit up in those dark orbs.

The new host climbed to its feet. It resembled the reptile it had been but with the boar's tusks and bulkier musculature, now even larger to accommodate the new size of the host. It was larger than either of its constituents had been but not as much as both of them combined should be. That made sense, it was denser. More muscles and bones to support them while the digestive system and the excretory system were all gone. Whatever the reptile's diet had been before, it didn't need to eat anymore. The wasps would eat though.

I stared, eyes tracing every section of the flowing black veins of melting wasps. It was strong and I could see the synergy with a spider-scorpion but I was still not sure why the limiter was so adamantly resisting against it. Even now, I couldn't ignore the instinctual waves of revulsion that filled my mind, even with my skills and the awareness that those feelings were not mine…

I was brought back to my physical body by a tapping on my window. A person in a very familiar mask stared wordlessly. An enforcer. They nodded at me and disappeared into the darkness. There was something different in my room. Something that hadn't been there before.

An envelope, sealed with a mana detecting Aetherite crystal tuned to my mana.