Milphage let out a long sigh. “Right. I knew things were going too well.”
“…” Shin Sung-Hyun silently agreed. He had also thought that the Magic Tower had been too easy to conquer.
‘Of course, it would have been quite a hassle without Ju-Ha…’?
But that was all it could have been—an annoyance. With a talented elemental skill user, the conquest had been easy. So easy, in fact, that it hadn’t made sense for the commission to be S-grade.
But as soon as they stepped onto the seventh floor, his opinion changed.
‘We should have come here as a small group of elites.’
Whatever was in that room could easily take out a large crowd of talented Players. He couldn’t even catch a glimpse of what it was, but his instinct as a Heaven was warning him of the danger.
“How did we not sense it from the lower floors?” Milphage wondered. Back at the base camp, they had been able to sense a massive, vicious aura from the tower. But it had disappeared when they entered the tower, which was suspicious.
“…I believe it is because this is a magic tower. The mages probably put up powerful barriers between each floor, so they won’t distract each other with their experiments,” said Shin Sung-Hyun suggested.
“Makes sense.”
“Let’s focus on the enemy in front of us for now.”
“Right. It seems like it’s a nasty cannibal,” Milphage said, staring at the wings and the remains of a bee. Whatever it was, it appeared to have eaten a lot. There were hundreds of dead bees in front of them.
“Captain Gong.”
“Y-Yes?”
Shin Sung-Hyun pointed to the door. “Hit it as hard as you can. I want to see how it reacts.”
“Alright, then…” She met Gasman’s eyes, and he nodded. Gasman then pulled up his sleeves, and smoke started to seep from the holes. It blanketed the ground and quickly reached the room.
Seo Jun-Ho noticed something. “It’s a different color from the smoke before?”
“It is a sleeping gas. And it’s quite flammable. No matter how strong its willpower is, it should be…”
– Kiiaaaaaaaaa!
“Fuck!”
“Aaahhh!”
The Players covered their ears at the mutant’s shriek. Some of them started to bleed from their eardrums, while most of them staggered from the shock.
“S-shit…” Milphage cursed as he leaned on the wall. “It has some killer vocal cords.”
He managed to pull himself together and shook his head. His eyes were filled with confusion. “…?”
Something was idly standing in front of him. He didn’t know when it arrived there. All he knew was that it appeared just as he recovered.
‘What is this guy?’?
It had a very strange appearance. It was neither human, bee, nor animal. It looked more like a combination of them.
‘A bee’s head and wings…With a human torso and a centipede’s legs?’?
It looked like someone had mashed its parts together like a doll, and its proportions were off as well. Compared to the enormous wasp head, its human torso was very skinny. Combined with its countless centipede legs, its appearance was very confusing.
‘But…’?
That only made him more nervous. Though it looked strange and botched, it gave off a powerful aura.
“…”
Once the Players realized what it was, they froze. They weren’t quite sure what to do. In this kind of situation, attacking recklessly could backfire on them.
“Tsk.”
Shin Sung-Hyun sucked his teeth. He realized that they couldn’t fight in a place like this.
‘We’re in a hallway, and there are still dozens of Players who have yet to come up.’?
Even if they ran away, they still wouldn’t be able to fight. It would be too easy for the monster to let itself loose.
“Go up.” The stairs leading to the next floor were on the other side. Without another word, Shin Sung-Hyun walked forward while emitting magic.
‘Ow.’
‘This is… the power of a Heaven?’?
.
The Players trembled as Shin Sung-Hyun’s aura pressed down on them. This was the first time they were grateful that he was their ally. If they had to face such a powerful aura on the battlefield, they would simply die from suffocation.
The entire floor was compressed. Shin Sung-Hyun used the same attack he had used to flatten hundreds of bees earlier.
– Kiiii?!?
However, the mutant managed to endure the attack. Its body merely hunched as if a great weight had been placed on its shoulders.
“Insect, follow me to the first floor.” The first floor was the reception area, so there were only a few offices there. It would be a much better battleground than here. Shin Sung-Hyun would fight the monster there. If they fought one on one, he was confident that he could squash the bug.
“M-Master!” Even before Gong Ju-Ha could finish crying out, the floor crumbled, and the monster fell to the lower floor.
Shin Sung-Hyun looked back, expressionless. “…Keep going up. If you happen to find something stronger than this bastard, run away and don’t look back.”
With the terse order, he jumped down the large hole.
Slam! Bam!?
The sound of floors being forcefully crumbled continuously reverberated. Every time it happened, the monster would cry out in pain, making the tower ring with its cries.
“…Master.” Jang Kyung-Hoon’s face grew pale. Shin Sung-Hyun was the heart of Goblin. If he were injured even in the slightest, Goblin’s fighting force would weaken as a whole.
“What are you standing around for?!” Milphage roared. He gnashed his teeth and fumed.
‘You idiot…’?
He hadn’t been able to do anything in the face of the mutant. However, Shin Sung-Hyun calmly assessed the situation and dragged the monster to a field where he would have the advantage. It was easy to picture what kind of horrors would have ensued if not for his quick thinking.
“Didn’t you hear him? We’re going up.”
Milphage was furious at his own incompetence.
‘I didn’t know there would be this big of a difference between us. What kind of Mercenary King am I?’?
He had previously thought that the only difference between them would be their skills and that he would have an edge with his experience in completing so many commissions.
However, Milphage had been greatly mistaken. In the midst of danger—at the most important moment—Shin Sung-Hyun had reacted better than him. The frustration of it all made smoke come out of his ears.
“We’ll hurry up and kill the king or queen up there and join Shin Sung-Hyun!” He took the lead, trying to recover from his show of ineptitude. He was the first one to step onto the eighth floor.
‘There’s nothing…’?
He didn’t sense anything similar from the mutant earlier on this floor. Disaster had already befallen this place, and there was nothing here except the corpses of bees. It was the same as the horrors they had seen on the seventh floor.
“That bastard… It ate bugs and eggs while coming down through each floor.” He started to understand what was going on. The mutant had realized that the Big 6 were much stronger than it had expected, so it had begun to cannibalize its own.
‘Was that the queen bee?’?
Milphage turned to Seo Jae-Gil. “Hey, former beekeeper. Was the monster from before the queen bee?”
“Huh? No…No, it shouldn’t be.” ．
“Why do you say that?”
“Its head and its wings were different from a queen bee’s. They actually looked like they were a typical worker bee. And even though queen bees are stronger than other bees… There isn’t that big of a difference. It’s more likely that it was one of the queen bee’s royal guards.”
That meant that the queen bee was elsewhere, probably on the tenth floor… Milphage looked up at the ceiling and started to run up the stairs.
“D-don’t go by yourself!” Kiora squawked and followed him up. The ninth floor resembled a laboratory.
“Ew…”
“Bleghh!”?
The Players with weaker stomachs threw up. It was filled with the corpses of many different kinds of bugs and animals, and the rotten stench stung their noses. There were also strange mutants that looked like they had been the result of crossbreeding, and they hung on hooks from the ceiling like pigs in a butchery.
“They must have been trying to evolve and become stronger with this.” While trapped, the bees had tried to force themselves to evolve.
“…They’re all dead.” Milphage nudged each of the hanging mutants. None of them moved. Actually, they were so misshapen that it was hard to picture that they were once alive. “Perhaps the only successful subject they had made was the one earlier…” It was also likely that the monster had only been born a day or two ago. It must have started to cannibalize the others as soon as it was born, as it had to be ridden with hunger.
“Joel!” Kiora yelled. “Its body! It looked like Joel’s! It had scars near the heart!”
“…Joel from Labyrinth?” Milphage asked.
“Yeah. He was killed yesterday during reconnaissance and was dragged away. That’s the guy.”
“…” He had no idea how the bees had been able to use such advanced techniques. This place had been closed off for hundreds of years, and it was too strange to judge it using common sense. “Let’s go to the tenth floor.”
With that, Milphage hurried up the stairs. Kiora rushed to follow, but she was met with his back as he stared blankly.
“Boss, what’s wrong?”
“…” Milphage stayed silent. All he could do was stare in horror. “…Hey, former beekeeper.”
“Y-yes! You called me?” Seo Jae-Gil pushed through the crowd from the bottom of the stairs.
Milphage held up his thick finger and pointed. “How should I take this?”
“That’s…” Seo Jae-Gil’s eyes widened as he followed Milphage’s finger. The walls had all been broken down, making the tenth floor seem like one large room. At the end of it was a large bee as big as a boulder. It had a queen bee’s wings and thorax.
“N-no…”
Most importantly, she was dead. The wall behind her was splattered with green sap-like blood, and her body was riddled with holes. It had definitely not been a natural death.
“She was obviously killed, but it doesn’t look like this was the work of a Player,” Milphage said. Based on the state of her body and the sap, she didn’t die yesterday or two days ago. She had definitely died at least a couple of weeks ago.
Seo Jae-Gil gulped. “If she wasn’t killed by a Player, this would be the doing of a worker bee.”
“A worker bee? They can kill queens?”
“Yes.” Seo Jae-Gil nodded. “If they judge that the queen bee cannot carry out her duties anymore, the worker bees will launch a coup d’etat and kill her.”
“What? I don’t understand.” Milphage’s eyebrows furrowed. “Didn’t you say so yourself? You said that when a queen bee dies, the colony will lose its hierarchy and that they turn on each other.”
“Typically, yes. But… It’s different if the worker bees themselves decided to launch a coup d’etat.”
“How so?”
“We call this ‘supersedure’. When the queen bee dies, the colony will instinctively realize that they have lost their leader. The routine of their life falls apart.”
“So what do they do?”
“The older of the worker bees will come together and make a decision.” They would choose a new queen based on a vote. Of course, she would only be a nominal queen and wouldn’t be able to carry out all the duties of a queen bee. The colony would still be able to function, but only drones would be born. The colony would inevitably collapse.
“…I’m sorry. I should have realized that when we saw that the proportions of the colony were off.” Seo Jae-Gil bit his lip, looking ashamed.
“Hey, don’t just brood by yourself and tell me straight. What does the colony do to survive?” He urged.
“…They invade other colonies,” he said, sounding nervous. “They find another hive, kill the queen, absorb the worker bees, and put them to work.”
“…” Milphage finally understood why a crack had appeared in Blackfield. “Those damned insects… Are they trying to enslave humans to survive?” His face contorted. “So, how do we find the fake queen?”
“Worker bees who become queens typically work like the others. There is no method to find a fake queen in a horde of worker bees.”
“…What?”
“Of course, they would still be usually bigger than other worker bees…” He trailed off. Though there was still daylight outside the window, a heavy shadow had begun to cover the sky as thousands of bees flew around the Magic Tower. “To be honest, I don’t think it’ll be possible to find the queen among them.”
“…” Milphage slammed his fist into the wall. “Dammit, then there’s nothing we can do?”
Everyone was silent. They had been too focused on the end goal that they had just realized that they had been going in the wrong direction. Now, they weren’t sure what to do.
“First…” Milphage quickly pulled himself together. He had already acted like an idiot earlier, and once was enough. “We’ll meet up with Shin Sung-Hyun. We’ll think about what we should do next after we kill the mutant bee.”
“Alright, then I’ll tell everyone to start heading down…”
“There’s no need for that.”
Milphage’s biceps swelled, and he punched the ground.
Crash!?
He had created a path for them to go down.
“That rascal, he looked pretty cool earlier.” Milphage sniffled, looking satisfied. He jumped down the hole he had created.
1. For reference, all worker bees are female but infertile. Drones are male, and they cannot work or create honey.