Chapter 147: To Bee Remembered
Belissar wanted nothing more than to take Niobee’s old queen, show her around, and then build her a nice beehouse…but there was a lot to do to clean up the battle. The most important of which was…to address the casualties.
The three soldiers felled by the lead Tower Guard were only the beginning. With how many opponents they faced and how coordinated the enemy way, the soldiers couldn’t keep up the perfect evasion and rotation they relied on. Soldiers were caught by stray swords and spears, or the wild swings of the wyverns’ tails and claws. Fireballs and lighting bolts and blades of wind cut though their formations when not blocked by the bumblebee soldiers. The bumblebee soldiers themselves had all survived but had taken good hits in the process.
The Second of the Sixth led her medicinal hive as they swarmed across the field, with the Fourth of the Seventh’s soldiers helping them carry trays of medicinal mana honey. The injured were assembled and fed honey as the medicinal bees injected healing compound directly into their wounds. Those who had lost wings were already being welcomed by Beero and her team.
And, those who could not be saved were gathered together for Belissar to carry to the Memorial.
As for Belissar himself…
His face fell as the worker bees curled up in his hand. To his horror, he realized that the bees that had stung the Tower Lord’s son were mundane honeybees, likely from the old queen’s hive. And that meant…they were subject to the normal rules of honeybees…including the loss of their stingers when they attacked larger foes. Belissar did his very best to help them with mana and medicinal honey…but these were normal bees. They possessed no mana of their own, so providing them with more didn’t help much. And the medicinal honey was not enough to handle that level of damage.
His shoulders drooped as he let out a sigh, then began to gather the fallen bees to carry with the others. There was nothing else he could do for them…save for this. He swore he would give their queen a wonderful home, so that their sacrifice would not have been in vain. The bees died, but the hive endured. Such was the way of things outside of his Tower.
But within his Tower, he had a say in how things went. And he would do his utmost to make this sort of sacrifice a relic of the past for all bees who dwelt here.
So came his next order of business. Now that the injured had been stabilized and the dead accounted for, Belissar made his way over to Chief Rohsuak and the karnuq. They were currently gathering the dead humans and wyverns and laying them out. They removed the saddles and packs from the wyverns, as well as any packs or weapons from the humans, and laid it all by the respective corpse.