Reincarnated To Evolve My Bee Empire

The lack of time forced the workers of the Bee Empire to work even harder than usual—and they were incredibly hard workers!

There were more plane scouting expeditions sent to the slumbering volcano in order to measure it and try to estimate how large its eruption was going to be. Our best Researchers made their calculations, but their terrible lack of experience in this matter showed itself.

Humans were more helpful. They weren't much more technically apt, but at least they witnessed various eruptions in history.

Through them, Agent Whisper even discovered tales about a volcano that had erupted in the past right in the area where we found OUR volcano!

Clearly, these were the same volcano. The old eruption happened several centuries ago, so the information about it was very unclear, but the legends told that the tsunami it caused travelled all the way to our shores, destroying entire villages.

I have ordered a full evacuation of the regions that were going to be affected. Only the workers and mechas that built wave-breakers stayed in the area, and they were ready to leave as soon as the Oracles brought a warning that the eruption day was looming ahead.

It happened only five days after we confirmed that the volcano was a volcano.

To make sure that the Oracles will have the most precise information about the volcano's activities, I kept spending fuel and sending planes with scouts to the volcano. There were fewer scouts on them, but this was all the difference.

On this day, Undecided brought me a dream of their future.

"The scouts that will be sent out in seven days will have to return ahead of time. When they arrive at the volcano, they will see it rising out of the sea and spitting clouds of noxious gases and smoke… In some dreams, they might even die when the plane can't escape these clouds and crashes into the ocean!"

By this point, even with all the hard work, only the simplest wave-breakers were built. After all, to stop a full-sized tsunami, they had to be colossal constructions even for our incredible workpower!

Still, our workpower WAS incredible. Otherwise, there wouldn't even be heaps of sand in their places.

In just a few days, millions of bees and thousands of humans carried sand, gravel, concrete and—of course—a lot of usnea seeds to the vulnerable shores to build the wave-breakers.

Most of them were constructed from ice of usnea trees, with soil and gravel being used mostly as support. They were massive wall-like structures going along the coastline, but not monolithic ones. Instead, they had tall protrusions on top, between which water could travel freely.

These wave-breakers would (hopefully) disperse some of the tsunami, at least weakening it and reducing the destruction it could create. While we could move people and items away from the shore, there were countless buildings, especially human-made, that could be destroyed by a tsunami.

Now I gave the order to stop building extra lengths and heights of wave-breakers and evacuate the builders, leaving any leftover materials behind for the sake of speed. There was no time for work remaining.

***

The eruption of a volcano was a once-in-a-lifetime event that I wouldn't have wanted to miss on any other day. But today, I was absolutely unable to watch it with my own eyes, even as an astral projection.

Instead, I was worrying about its consequences.

This was a predicted day. The scouts weren't sent to the volcano, and the wave was going to hit us just before lunch.

I got news about it from the scouts whose astral projections were patrolling the sea and the air about it. (These scouts' bodies weren't located anywhere near the shores, of course. They were fully in the safe zone.)

"It's like the sea decided to rise upward and move toward us," Attendant Helping-Hands read aloud the unusually poetic report. "With the speed it travels, the wall of water will reach the shore in three hours."

"Just on schedule. Follow the plans."

The plans were simple. We did what we could, so now we just had to wait.

My astral projection was there when the tsunami reached our shores.

From the perspective of a tiny bee like me, it really was just as the scout described. As if the sea decided to stand up and slap me down like a gnat… The water in this gigantic wave was almost black from raised dirt and grey from all the foam on top.

This was the shape of a wave that was about to fall upon the pathetic bee and human buildings standing on the shore. Before the evacuation, there were three human villages and a small town, but now there were only empty living stone walls. They were protected only by a thin line of wave breakers…

The tsunami passed it, barely losing any of its height or momentum.

After their former inhabitants left, insects and wild beasts began to repopulate these places—especially beasts that escaped from the volcano toward the land.

Even from the distance of dozens of kilometres away, I heard the rumbling splash of the tsunami as it fell upon these buildings, covering them and all these critters within.

When the water slowly began to move away—at least to the point where I should have been able to see the roofs of human buildings—it left behind only rubble and empty spaces.

The area of land along the shore, dozens of kilometres wide, was wiped clean of civilization just like that. Thousands of hours of work were gone in the blink of an eye.

And it was still a good ending—at least all the people from these places were safe.

'Lots of land for real estate freed up for me and Amby to build ourselves a summer residence…' I even thought humorously.

Then I spotted something dark in the sky above the horizon. It looked like a cloud, but even storm clouds were usually a slightly different colour.

A cloud… like from volcanic ash.