The Bee Dungeon

Belissar considered what would happen if a Tower Lord made contact with him. His gut instinct was that...it would go very badly. The gods may not have cared that a peasant had taken command of a Tower...but the Tower Lords still would. They were the ones who likely started the idea that peasants would defile a Tower in the first place. So, Belissar couldn’t imagine they would be happy to see him as the master of one.

And, of course, Belissar didn’t really need to imagine. His entire village had been burned to the ground with presumably no survivors just for being in the area when a Tower was created. He assumed the Tower Lords would continue such treatment should they discover him.

All of that meant that Belissar needed to be prepared to fight.

And at the moment...he had no confidence in opposing a Tower Lord. Even knowing some of their secrets and exposing some of their lies, Belissar couldn’t shake the image of Tower Lords as near-mythical figures commanding god-like powers and invincible armies. If anything, now that he knew about the powers a Tower and the blessing of a god could offer, he figured the Tower Lords’ strength might be even closer to the legends than he originally thought, especially those who had been around for many normal lifetimes. Who knew what sort of defenders or perks or blessings they might have in their own Towers?

And then there were the Tower Guard. They alone were a mighty army that had never lost a fight that Belissar had ever heard about. Whenever word of rebellions or bandits or shades from the Hunger came, they all ended the same way. No matter how badly things went for the local forces, once the Tower Guard were deployed to the scene the situation was handled.

So, how would Belissar’s Tower stack up against even a conservative estimate of the Tower Lords and their guards?

Belissar didn’t need firsthand observations or military experience to say not well at all. As impressive as his bee army was to him and maybe the bear folk, it was by no means large. The soldier bee numbers were, what, in the hundreds? Maybe? The low hundreds at best. Belissar hadn’t seen the Tower Guard himself but from what he had heard they certainly had more than a few hundred soldiers to spare. That meant even against the Tower Guard his current forces would be outnumbered...and he was under no illusion that a soldier bee would be anything close to a match for a Tower Guard. Even a token force would likely cut through everything his Tower had to offer like a hot knife through butter.

He didn’t imagine a pit trap or a bit of mad honey would bother them very much either. And this was all before he began to imagine what an actual Tower Lord might be capable of.

So, the answer was clear. Belissar and his bees needed to grow stronger. Much stronger. He would need thousands, even tens of thousands or more soldier bees before he believed he had even a small chance at surviving. He would need bees who could face the shade from the initial purification one on one. He would need traps and weapons that could handle people capable of great and heroic feats.