Reincarnated To Evolve My Bee Empire

To find more about the sea beasts, I gave Bloodhero the order to send out her best scouts. I also donated more eye flesh samples to Tabletina to create more scouts with "system eyes", although I hated the procedure.

(Every time I felt like THIS might be the time Tabletina's hand slips and I lose my eye. And I had to walk with an eyepatch for the rest of the day every time until the eye could fully heal.)

The ocean was a much harder place to navigate than land, even for astral projections who could fly through it as easily as if it were open sky. Not only was visibility in the water reduced, but the landscape of the sea was absolutely unfamiliar to my people.

They knew how to navigate on land, but the sea had no borders. There were some landmarks on the seabed: massive underwater mountains, giant rock-like creatures, and forests of tall, flexible trees without flowers; they didn't help establish the territories of creatures that mostly lived far above these landmarks.

All that the bees knew for sure was that the beasts we looked for liked to attack our ships.

Bloodhero suggested putting scouts on the travelling ships so that they could watch out for underwater threats. She already gave all bees on ships an order to be vigilant for the sea beasts, but not every ship had a bee on board that could use astral projection.

Most had, though. This upgrade to our morphotypes had plenty of time to spread over the Bee Empire.

"Therefore, putting extra scouts on ships will be a waste of their time," I said to Bloodhero. "And possibly a waste of their lives if things go dire… No, we must act smarter. Prepare a special ship—no, better prepare a few of them!—and make sure they are armed with good weapons and have lifeboats with a place to spare. Put a few extra barrels of flammable oil mix and gunpowder. Then send these ships to the areas where the beasts have likely attacked in the past and wait."

This was an idea that made Bloodhero's eyes sparkle.

"Yes, Father! This will be a perfect trap. Even if the beasts sink the ship, some Hardbees can lie in wait so they can blow it up right in front of our enemies. And the ship's crew can escape on boats. I will make sure the ships in the area are close enough to help the survivors out."

I grinned.

"You got it all correctly, my dear. Now do it. If the beasts sink our ships, I want it to happen on OUR terms."

***

After the bait ships were sent out, I could only wait. There was no telling if the beasts would take the bait at all, but this was our best plan.

Of course, it wasn't the only one. The Bee Empire's scouts searched the sea the old-fashioned way, finding new and strange beasts every day and passing the information about them to the Hive Supremo's Archives. However, until they could witness an attack on the ship, they weren't sure which of the many underwater titans could have attacked them.

When I originally gave an order to search the sea for hostile beasts, I thought that there wouldn't be many possible candidates. Something that could sink a ship had to be huge even by human standards. There were a lot of fish the size of entire beehives, but to sink a human ship, they had to be the size of a HUMAN house.

But my expectations turned out to be very wrong.

The sea was full of titans!

They were fighting each other in the constant free-for-all, and according to the reports of scouts, seemingly growing in average size every day!

This was the winning strategy in the ocean, where the depth allowed this: to grow so huge that you could swallow your competition like a sperm whale swallows krill!

There were just too many beasts that could've sunk a ship. They were too large to stay in shallow waters where fishermen usually gathered their haul, but deeper, where ships travelled, they were prevalent.

So the scouts found no definite information until three weeks later, when one of the bait ships was attacked.

According to the report, the attack was closer to a natural disaster or a cataclysm!

When it happened, the scouts on the ship had noticed the approach of a massive sea beast from far away—but the ship couldn't go fast enough to evade it.

The beast itself truly was the size of a house—a very long human house. Its silhouette was visible from above the water at a distance away, even without using astral projections to look from the water itself.

And the beast purposefully swam toward the human ship and began ramming it with tremendous force!

Its very first attack crushed the hull, almost breaking the ship in half. Only thanks to the scouts' forewarning, the human crew had time to sit in lifeboats and try to swim away.

The second blow of the beast was enough to crush the ship fully—the report said that the helm and mast broke off entirely. Two lifeboats were flipped by the waves raised by the monster's tail flipper, and the people from them were swallowed by the waves. Or by the beast.

In this situation, even the scouts were too busy protecting their lives to check it! They had to hold onto their bodies and couldn't send out astral projections.

Who knew whether the beast would've attacked the lifeboats after that—but then the Hardbees had lit the explosives on it, and the remains of the ship blew up into the beast's face, forcing it to retreat.

Sadly, the Hardbees themselves didn't survive this—although they were immune to heat, the destruction of the ship locked them inside its rooms and prevented them from escaping.

They knew they would likely die if they stayed on the ship to finish their task, but did it anyway to save their sisters outside from the beast…

But what kind of beast was that?