The next few days passed by without much fanfare, well, I say that but every time i'm with the princess I feel like there should be fanfare. Anyway, I went hunting with Fighter a couple of times, she did most of the work but she was using one of the spears instead of her deadly forearm so she could show me how to handle a weapon. She ended up breaking three of them because of her absurd strength. I did learn quite a bit about the edible creatures of the forest, such as the fact that due to being a monster the boars and stuff not only reproduced like a normal animal but occasionally burst forth from nothing so there was always plenty and no chance of wiping out a species from over hunting.

Lessons from the queen were on proper hive operations. Like the reason this one had so many worker teams on excavation was because of where we were, they were digging further and deeper in attempts to find stone or metal, but under the middle of a forest was a bad location. I asked how they knew about metal working and it was another job of fire ants, at high levels they not only control fire but gain immunity to it, so they can work metal like clay and use it to make metal versions of clay items and some simple weapons, like a spear with a molded copper head instead of a hammered and sharpened head.

She also told me she planned to march almost the entire hive to the cify and have them surrender, many would probably be killed on the spot, others tortured, but a mass surrender should shake some of the people up and maybe give princess' hive extra time to get established before anyone started looking for it. The queen herself planned to stay here with only one guard watching over her until she died of her pheromone deprivation, which was not a bad way to go, you just get more and more tired until one day you go to sleep and never woke up. It was the price for killing her king, but one she would have paid every time.

I also got a chance to see grouped worker magic, three of the craft room workers got to level two from spear making and when using their compress earth spell in tandem it made a roughly three meter deep divot in the ground and turned it into a rock the size of my head. There was another restriction to the will of the hive when magic was involved, the spells must be cast completely simultaniously, which can be done easy enough with their antenna wiggle telepathy, but that only had a ten meter range so no army of a million workers compressing the entire planet.

It was on the fifth day after the princess' stomach trouble, I was busy trying to wrangle some workers into a new crafting formation when a guard rushes in and tells Fighter something. "Princess moulting, king see" she translated for me.

I jumped up and we both ran to the queen's chamber. The princess was on her bed but i could tell right away that she was mid shed, her hands had gripped the sides of the bed and her pose easily made me think of a cicada. I wanted to help her but the queen stopped me, I jumped when a loud 'CRACK' resounded as her back split open, and she started crawling out of her own skin. Her back pulled out a little first but then with a SHLORP her head popped free and she took a deep breath. Her upper arms were next and she used them to get some leverage to help pull out the lower ones. Using both sets at once her butt came free and her legs switly followed.

"You can help her now" the queen said as she put her hand down.

I rushed over and helped her move to the side of her old shell so she could lay flat, she then splayed her arms and fingers to maximize her exposed surface area. Her back plates were the first to harden, changing from murky white to black. The darkening spread in layers with the plates closest to her back, like her shoulder plates, then the upper arms and legs before the lower. It was easiest to see on her abdomen as a clear wave of darkness moved from where it connected to her thorax to the tip. Once all her exposed plates were completely black I helped her roll over to expose her front side, which included her new breasts.

She caught me looking and smirked "like what you see?"

I looked away instantly and blushed like mad, but slowly forced myself to look back "yes"

Now it was her turn to blush.

The queen stopped our flirting "now now, will be plenty of time for that later. Since you are done drying off dear, both of you come over here"

I helped the princess stand up and even though I only took my eyes off her for a second there was suddenly a bunch of workers and guards behind her. We walked over and the queen stopped us exactly one arm length away, the workers and guards then fanned out around us into a circle and linked arms in a crisscrossing pattern. The queen then looked to the sky held up all four arms and her antenna wiggled like mad, after a couple seconds all the workers and guards around us started their own antenna up, and they were all going in perfect sync. After a minute of this she suddenly stopped and grabbed my shoulders with both her right hands and the princess' with her left ones.

Your union has been blessed with

"Approval of 5 queens"

for more information please see your traits screen

My eyes bug out in surprise, this is the first time blue box has popped up on it's own since the tutorial, i'm broken from my surpise by the princess

"Mother, how on earth did you reach enough queens that there were five willing to bless us?" The princess seems as surprised as I was, but for a different reason.

"I only reached five, they all agreed." The princess' face goes from confused surprise to completely flabbergasted "they also agreed you will need a true name, you are not just another nameless queen that will simply survive long enough to make a princess." She paused to take a deep breath "It has been agreed by a conference containing at least four queens that you have earned the name of... Victoria!"

The princess, Victoria, somehow gained a level of surprise that I had never seen before. The tension in the air suddenly cuts off as all the workers and guards around us pass out and fall over eachother in a heap. I just couldn't help it, I started laughing, it took me over a minute to calm down, I had my hands on my knees and had started to feel light headed.

"I'm sorry, really, seeing serious situations being interrupted by something goofy really gets to me. Can someone tell me what happened?" I asked

"Of course, that was a queen's conference, it lets us have our hive members subsume themselfs into acting as an amplifier for their queen to contact other queens. The greater the number and more varied the hive members the better range it has, I barely had enough soldiers to count as two types, I definitely did not have enough celestials for three. Using this I managed to reach five queens and we talked about if you, Kadi, would be a good king. I told them everything i knew about you and they agreed you would be one, so they granted your union with Victoria their blessing which does several things, you can ask the blue box for details later." She explained

She suddenly perked up and said excitedly "Now, you still need to seal your union with kiss, come on now don't be shy."

I blushed fiercely but still turned towards Victoria and smiled at her, she took a couple extra seconds to ready herself but she turned and smiled towards me too. We both leaned forward at the same time and gave eachother a very simple peck on the lips. It took all my willpower to pull back instead of pushing in deeper to turn it into a full blown makeout session, the queen watching was probably what tipped the scales. I slowly backed my head away and she did the same, I could see she wanted to do more as well.

The queen intterupted our impromptu staring contest "Wait till you start your own hive before getting to that, Victoria wont have much fun trying to dig out her first chamber while full of eggs"

I could only look away and awkwardly rub my head, she was right, but jumping to the end was unfair.

Victoria, though, took it a little harder "mother! Don't say it like that, I know the order of these things!"

"Yes dear, now this will be goodbye" she must have noticed my look because she continued "you have been joined, so you must now start your hive, Fighter will lead you to the edge of my area towards where I wanted to go before i was forced to stop here. Trust your instincts and you will find a good location" and she waves us off.

Fighter leads us back to my room where i grab my stuff and ask if I can hold on to the light ant, which are actually called celestial I guess?

"Queen knew you ask, told me say yes, only tiny cheating rules"

That queen learned a lot about me in a really short amount of time. Fighter then took us to the craft room which has no ants in it, all of them having been pulled for the conference, and had us take a spear each. Then to the cook room to get some dried out meat, and finally we reached the surface. Victoria is super nervous, this is the first time she had left the hive, I put the celestial ant on my head and she clung on almost automatically, i then moved my spear to my left and and grabbed one of Victoria's hands with my right. She looks towards me and I gave her a smile, she nodded and took a step over the threshold of the entrance tunnel.

She let out a small breath she was holding and Fighter started leading us off in a direction further away from the town. We walked for several hours before the sun started to set and it was getting dark, but because i have the celestial on me we kept walking for an extra hour before we stopped to camp. I told Fighter to cut down some branches and i'd make the shelters, I asked Victoria to dig three people sized divots that would be filled with leaves to act as beds, her getting in some digging practice now will help later. Me and Fighter did our tasks easy enough but Victoria struggled a little at first because she didn't get into proper digging form for several minutes.

She finished it eventually, I filled them with leaves and placed the branch shelters over them. I also decided to take first watch since we don't have a swarm of workers to watch over us. The celestial was turned off and i sat on a log rolled into the middle of the group of shelters and opened up my new trait to see what was up.

"Approval of 5 queens"

A very rare variant of the "Approval of a queen" trait

This trait grants improved fertility x5

This trait increases the odds that children will be above average x5

This trait allows acess to certain very rare class variants

huh, those were some... very interesting specifics. It basically says it will help me have many strong children. Suppose I will be able to test it out soon enough.