Chapter 19

Beepocalypse

When I wake up in the morning I recap my four ideas that I came up with to deal with the bees.

Smoke them out with a new magic. Set fire to the hive. Use Plant Shaping magic to burrow in and sneak some out. Use Annihilation Spike to create new entrances and spread out the guards.

When listed like that number 3 becomes the only viable option. It is the least dangerous and can be completed immediately. Well I need to actually do my morning training first. I do not want to skip and start forming bad habits. So I go ahead and create ten new targets and then go through what is now my familiar morning training routine. Try not to get to anxious Mark, as the old saying goes, Haste makes Waste. Hmm, that really does not seem to apply here, oh well just finish up and have lunch and then it is time.

After lunch I start to travel at high speed towards the Bee Hive. Direction Sense lets me know I am heading the right way. Direction Sense is great. As long as I have a clear picture of it I can always tell where something is in relation to me. Hold on a second, clear picture, why don’t I just teleport? I stop and concentrate on the area where I was observing the hive from before. I then think Teleport. My surrounding shimmer like how heat waves on a hot day look and suddenly I can see the Giant Bee Hive. It worked. I have got to remember that I have magic now and it can help solve common everyday problems like transportation.

I sneak as quietly as possible over to the tree that has the branch that the Giant Bee Hive is suspended from. I make sure to be on the opposite side of the trunk of the tree away from the bee hive before I start my Plant Shaping magic. I start to burrow into the tree and close the hole behind me while leaving air holes. I do not want anything to sneak in behind me while I am concentrating on moving forward. About every 2-3 meters I create a small spy hole and air hole combo so I can check on my progress and make sure I am going in the right direction.

Slow and sure wins the race. It has taken me several hours but I am closing in on my goal. I am almost directly above where the beehive is attached to the tree branch. I made sure to rest about every fifteen minutes to keep my mana as high as possible. The last thing I need is to succeed with my plan and penetrate the hive and then not have any mana to fight or defend myself with. During this last break I have been hearing some creaking and cracking sounds. Almost like branches moving in the wind.

I wonder if the wind has started to blow hard out there, I have been inside this branch for hours the weather could have changed. I start to use Plant Shaping for hopefully the last round and suddenly the sounds from earlier start to get louder and the tunnel I am creating starts to dip down. Oh no, I forgot to account for the stability of the branch! I have to get out of here. I start running back down the tunnel I have created in the wood racing against time. A little over a minute later I hear a gigantic crack from behind me. I spin around and see what I feared.

My tunneling had weakened the branch and with the weight of the bee hive on it the giant branch had broken off. All I could see now was an opening at the now much closer end of the branch and no bee hive. I cautiously made my way back to the end of the branch that had broken off. It was only about 50 meters behind me. Man am I glad I started running when I did or I might have gone tumbling down with the bee hive. I peer over the edge to see massive chaos on the forest floor below.

Several hundred bees are swarming around the wreckage of the bee hive. It looks some sort of horrible car wreck only with bee carcasses and hive bits instead of automobiles. Oh man did I screw this one up. I should have realized making a big hole throughout the entire branch would have weakened it. Now I am going to have to wait until the bees settle down or move on and see if there is anything I can salvage out of that mess down on the forest floor. After about an hour of Giant Bees buzzing around the wreckage they start to fly off in a swarm towards the east. I guess they decided they cannot salvage anything else and need to start a new hive somewhere.

I slowly make my way down to the wreckage of the hive and start going through it. There is plenty of ruined honey spread around, but I need fresh stuff. As I cut through another section of destroyed hive with my scythes I hear a buzzing sound from the wreckage in front of me. Oh there are survivors trapped. I can work with this. If there are survivors, that means there is surviving honey. Not only can I get the honey I want, but I can farm the trapped bees for experience to level up.

Maybe my mistake will pay off after all. I cautiously slice through the layers of hive in front of me and see a pocket of open space with three or four bees furiously flying about. Man this is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. Wait Mark, don’t get too cocky. You were overconfident in your last plan and look how that turned out. Ok let’s think this through. First, the opening is too small for them to attack me so I should be safe. Second I need to use a spell to reach them but one that won’t cause damage to the honey in the cells around the bees. Third I need to make sure I keep paying attention to my surroundings. I am sure other scavengers are going to be showing up eventually.

I decide that ice will do the least amount of damage to my potential honey stash. If my honey gets a little cold, I can always warm it back up. I start shooting Exploding Ice Spikes at the trapped bees and for once everything seems to go right. The bees are killed relatively easy and I enlarge the hole so I can enter in and plunder the honey. Just as I am about to open the first cell and extract the honey I realize something important. I do not have anything to store the honey in. Well that is embarrassing. I do all this work and at the last minute right when I am about to be successful I run into this simple problem.

At least this is an easy fix. I climb back out of the pocket I was in and go to the closest section of splintered branch that fell down. I use Plant Shaping to make increasingly large containers. I had an idea when I was making the first one. I want the largest possible container that I can carry in my inventory so I can store more honey. I decide to scale them up by .5 meters. So I now have six containers in front of me. A .5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, and finally a massive 3.0 meter tall container. I try putting each one into and then taking it out of my inventory. They all go in and out just fine. I wonder if there is a limit on my inventory.

I was about to make even larger containers to try it out when I realized that I was already going to have trouble maneuvering that giant 3 meter container around. I know, I will just make several of the giant containers and then fill up the small ones and dump them into the big one. That way I get the maximum amount of honey possible. I craft 9 more giant containers for a grand total of ten massive 3 meter tall containers. I place them all in my inventory along with the 1 meter tall one that I will use to fill them with and head back to the pocket of space where I killed the trapped bees.

I started opening up the individual cells of honey that made up the beehive and started filling my containers. It took me about 30 minutes to an hour to fill one giant 3 meter container of honey. There is no way I can finish this today, but I do not want to leave the bee hive site and waste time travelling back and forth until I get everything I want. I decide to make a temporary camp up in the tree that the bee hive used to hang from. I already have a prebuilt tunnel that fits me there and I can just close of the ends with Plant Shaping.

Once I decided on this plan I just kept tunneling and filling and tunneling and filling. I managed to get four containers filled before I felt that I needed to stop for the night. I quickly retraced my steps to the outside of the hive wreckage and was surprised to see several other animals all burrowing through the debris. I guess I was so deep inside the wreckage I could not hear them. None of the animals are fighting each other though. I guess there is a truce as long as there is plentiful food available. I retreat back up the tree and set up my sanctuary for the night. I hope there is still some left in the morning.

Morning came soon enough and I opened up my temporary rest area and looked down at the wreckage. There still seemed to be plenty of untouched areas to scavenge honey from. There are not as many scavengers as yesterday either. They must have filled themselves up or are more daylight creatures and will be back later today. Either way I need to get started as soon as possible. I make my way back down the tree and angle myself towards an unclaimed section of wreckage to start my scavenging.

Scavenging this morning went the same as yesterday. The only difference was that I ran into fewer and fewer surviving Giant Bees as the day wore on. Finally, a couple of hours after lunch time I filled that last of my ten giant containers with honey. Should I make some more and continue or should I just call it good? I decide that I will continue on until I only have 5 spots left in my inventory. I mean even if I cannot use all of the honey, it should be a great trading material in the future if I run into other intelligent beings. I mean Giant Bee honey can’t be that common of an item.

My next two days are spent doing just that. I create a couple of containers and then go fill them up. After the second day I find no more surviving Giant Bees, and the pace speeds up significantly because I no longer have to keep stopping and fighting. By the end of the second day there is little of the giant hive that is not picked over by myself or one of the other scavengers. In fact, many of the creatures that have gathered are starting to look at each other like they might prefer to eat each other instead of the harder and harder to find honey stashes. I decide to call an end to my scavenging ways and head back towards the tree house. When I get back I will consolidate my gains and decide on what to do in the future. I must have leveled up at least once from all the bees I killed, but I haven’t bothered to check my status in days.