Activating [Battle sense] I carefully watched the bee on my shoulder; it was blue but had odd green tendrils curled around it. Looking around at the other bees, they too all had the gently swaying green streaks wrapped around their furry bodies. I had never seen something that wasn’t just one colour, but it was probably the beekeeper’s Skill persuading the bees to view me as an ally even though they might not have been inclined too.

Breathing out shakily I slowly sank to my knees and sat down between the piles of materials. The bee on my shoulder fluttered off and joined the mass bees bumbling about as a gentle breeze stirred them up before they settled on the multi-coloured flowers again. Curiously I attempted to use [Formation] on a bee to get it to fly up but I could feel the Skill failing, I suppose since we weren’t really allies it wouldn’t work.

I looked down at the book in my hands and flipped it open to the bookmarked page. It was a detailed diagram of a completed honeybee hive with labelled parts and the next few pages explained how to build one. I sighed in relief, the beekeeper’s explanation had been quite rushed and I wasn’t sure if I could have managed without instructions.

Looking up I surveyed the area around me; the toolbox was open with a small bag of variously sized nails propped against it. A lot of the tools were missing or strewn about the floor between stacks of materials and bees were currently crawling over everything. I was getting more worried about how to do this without getting stung or accidentally squashing one inadvertently making them my enemies.

If I could make them my allies first, I could use [Formation] to get them to move out of my way to build the hives in peace. Thinking back, I had made the ants my allies by helping them in a fight but as far as I could see the bees weren’t fighting anything, just flying around gathering nectar and pollen. Other than bears, what would attack bees? I doubted a bear was going to waltz into the village to steal honey and even if it did, its not like I could fight a bear so it was a pretty pointless thought.

Ants had tonnes of predators, which made it a significantly easier to practice fighting since they were constantly being hunted. Then again, they weren’t fire ants so they were sort of terrible at fighting back, unlike bees, which made my job as [Tactician] harder. Maybe if I built them a new hive they’d view me as an ally?

I didn’t have many other ideas for becoming allied right now but building the hive without getting allied status first would make be harder. Out of ideas I read the instruction book and satisfied that it wasn’t too complicated I reached for the bag of nails and hammer, almost dropping it when I picked it up.

Made by a skilled Blacksmith with the use of [Enforce power], this hammer provides +3 strength Bonus stats when wielded.

I paused to inspect the hammer, it was lighter than expected, but maybe that was just due to my increased strength. It just looked like a normal hammer; a long wooden shaft with a comfortable grip and a metal head with the heavier side shaped in a flat circular surface and the other side flattened with a triangular gap for pulling out nails with. Nothing stood out or indicated it had any bonus stats before I’d picked it up. I knew items that increased Bonus stats existed, but this was the first time I’d come across any.

I checked my status, which did indeed have +3 under Bonus stats for strength next to it. I put the hammer down and the +3 changed back to +/-0 and back to +3 when I picked it up again. I grinned; my strength was 6 so +3 made a very significant difference. I tucked the hammer into my belt to pull over the half built hive, but the +3 disappeared. Frowning I thought back to the notification; I had to wield the hammer for the strength bonus.

It turned out that literally just meant I had to hold it in my hand, anything else and it didn’t work. Irritated I clamped the hammer against the hive under my hand and dragged it over, that way I was technically holding it, even if it was a bit awkward, but my overall strength was still increased.

I sat down and held up the materials, luckily they were all cut into the right sizes so all I had to do was put it together. With the sun over head and bees buzzing around me I got to work, I had to stop occasionally to refer back to the manual or to carefully shoo some bees away, but overall I made good progress. I hummed lightly as I worked; this type of work was far more gratifying than washing dishes.

You have unlocked the Class: [Carpenter]

I was about to brush the notification away, but hesitated, though I really had no long term interest in carpentry I could always get rid of a Class; people did it every week at apprenticeships so why not take it? It might help with building the hives and I was curious about different Classes.

Selecting [Carpenter] I took a look at what Skills I had available.

[Carpenter Lvl 1] Skill points: 10 Skills: [None] Skills available:

[Find flaw] – 10 Skill points

[Measure materials] – 10 Skill points

[Equal edges] – 10 Skill points

Just like with [Tactician], at level 1 I received 10 Skill points and 3 Skills costing 10 Skill points each. Maybe that was the standard for level 1 of every Class? I wasn’t sure if the first 3 Skills would be the same for everyone, though I was pretty confident that later Skills would vary among people.

I wasn’t going to keep the Class so it didn’t really matter which Skill I picked, though since all the materials were already the right size, I doubted I would need [Measure materials]. I wasn’t sure how the other two worked and deliberating a bit I picked [Find flaw] since I figured it might at least tell me when I did something wrong.

[Find flaw] Detect errors in constructed items

That was a predictable description and not too complicated. I tried to activate the Skill, but even though I could feel the rightness of the Skill working, I couldn’t notice anything different. Frowning I focused on the almost finished beehive. Still nothing.

I reached over to turn it on its side and the moment my hands made contact, the beehive lit up in faint soft golden hues with smaller areas of light red. Pausing I took it in, just like with [Battle sense] the colouring was faint since the Skill was only level 1, but unlike [Battle sense] it seemed like it was confined to items I was touching.

I sat back a bit disappointed, a small part of me had hoped that I’d gotten rare and special Skills, but now if I had to guess, [Battle sense] was probably a fairly common Skill available to [Tacticians]. I briefly thought back to [Steel carapace], it was my most expensive Skill and maybe it was a rarer Skill as from what I knew, most [Tacticians] unlocked their Class through a school and training, so chances were they didn’t practice with insects. Though that didn’t necessarily mean it was better than what other [Tacticians] unlocked, I really had no reference points to compare and all of this was based on assumptions and speculations.

Looking back at the hive I was holding, I focused on some of the red areas, mostly it was nails that hadn’t been hammered in perfectly straight and some wooden boards that weren’t perfectly aligned to fractions of mm. I scowled at it, the Skill was over critical, the hive was fine and what difference did it make if a nail was half a mm to the left of being completely straight in the wood. I glared at the hive, the Skill was just making me feel bad about the hive, I thought I’d done pretty well.

I suppressed the irrational urge to kick the hive across the room. Closing my eyes I took a deep breath before picking up the hammer and nails again to finish the hive. This time using the Skill to alert me when something wasn’t exactly perfectly lined up, even though it did drive me bit crazy with how hard it was to satisfy the Skills definition of ‘not flawed’.

“Hey not too shabby” the voice jolted me out of my concentration and I almost dropped the nail I was holding. I turned to see the beekeeper standing behind me scrutinising the completed hive and the new one I had started. My progress had slowed down as I became a perfectionist, but the end result was a structurally sound hive.

“Thanks” I said watching him, the sun had moved across the sky and I looked like I’d been here for half of the day. I deflated a bit; maybe I should have done more? It was probably fine though since the hives were fairly large and the beekeeper seemed ok with my progress.

“Calf came, male unfortunately but nothing to do about it. Stable hands can handle the rest, anyway I came back to check you, but you finished a hive so lets move the bees into their new home” he straightened and moved to start lugging the new hive towards the broken ones. I stood up and trotted behind him as he settled the new hive next to the most damaged one, before carefully moving the considerably heavier damaged one to the side and putting the new one in its place.

“Now then” he turned to squint down at me as he leaned on the new hive with one tanned arm “The bees won’t be happy about being moved, I’ll keep them calm so they won’t do anything unless you do something stupid, so don’t do anything stupid ok?” I nodded nervously.

“How many bees are in that hive?” I asked

“About 60 000” I honestly wasn’t sure if that was a lot or not so I just nodded a bit cautiously.

“Now this hive is quite damaged, I’m not sure how many frames are salvageable, it was only so much I could do to stop the queen form taking her bees and swarming”

“Why do bees swarm?” I hoped that wasn’t a stupid question as I watched him assess the old hive.

“Swarming is when the queen takes half or so of the worker bees and looks for a new home, usually in spring or if there isn’t enough space for expansion” he said absent mindedly as he peered through the large hole in the hive before pulling back “Alright, some of frames in the brood chamber are damaged, but I think we can save maybe 6 of them”

When I had made the new hive, the brood chamber had had 10 frames so assuming the old one was the same then that wasn’t too bad considering the extent of the damage.

He opened the hive and very carefully lifted out a frame positively covered in bees and very gently moved it into the new hive. I watched wide eyed very aware that I had no protection and was relying on his Skills to protect me “Ok you can do the next one, its not hard”

I stared at him and hesitantly move to the hive, I really needed gloves “Hold it here” he indicated where to hold the next frame and I reached out putting my hands on the frame, inhaling sharply and freezing when bees touched my fingers. Their feelers investigated my hands but didn’t attack. I fought the urge to snatch back my hands and I lifted it out slowly like he said and carefully moved it over to the new hive, inserting it like he said. When I finally let go I frantically rubbed my hands trying to get the feeling of insects crawling over them off.

I helped him add the salvaged frames and 4 new ones, not quite getting used to the feeling of bees crawling along my hands, but tolerating it and at some point the blue bees streaked with green had changed to solid green. Though only the bees from this hive changed to green, the bees from other hives didn’t seem to care either way but that was to be expected.

The beekeeper added the bees from the damaged frames into the brood chamber near the new frames before fixing the queen excluder on top, which was basically just a horizontal grid with holes large enough for worker bees but too small for the queen to fit through.

Similarly, on top of that came 2 honey supers with 10 frames each, which were unfortunately far more damaged than the frames from the brood chamber. These 2 supers were where most of the honey was stored, though it would be a while before they would be ready to collect. Finally the crown board and roof were added.

You have unlocked the Class: [Animal handler]

I frowned, wouldn’t it have made more sense for me to unlock [Beekeeper]? I watched as the beekeeper inspected the 13 damaged frames from the honey super and sighed, parts were broken or missing, clearly the Orcs had made some attempt to take honey, but hadn’t had time or finesse to do it properly.

“We’ll give them some time to get used to the new hive” he commented looking around at the other hives “We still have 2 other hives that need replacing, the rest can probably get away with just having a few parts replaced” he looked down at me critically “You managed better than I expected, we’ve still got half a day so go eat lunch and keep working until I get back, I need to sort out some things with the cows, the stable hands can only manage so much before something goes wrong” his expression soured a bit, hand scratching his short gray hair.

“See you later then” he started walking off before turning around “Oh and don’t get overconfident thinking that coz you helped move one hive that you can handle the bees. Don’t touch the hives, or try to open any of them, or try to move a new hive by yourself. You will get stung, a lot and I won’t pay you if you mess up, clear?” he looked at me intensely, impressing that message on me and I nodded quickly.

“I won’t touch the hives”

“Good” he nodded and disappeared into the house, closing the door behind him leaving me with the bees again. Only this time, one hive was allied with me; a smile curled my lips as I looked back at the new hive, and the faintly green bees buzzing around it.

I thought back to the [Animal handler] notification, maybe that would help with directing the bees, besides, [Carpenter] hadn’t levelled and honestly that experience had been more frustrating than rewarding. Without pause I tried deactivating [Carpenter] and a new notification came up.

Are you sure you wish to remove [Carpenter] from your Class 2 slot? Yes/No?

Note: All level progress, Skills and augmented Stats will gradually be lost

Selecting yes a wave of nausea hit me and I folded forwards clutching my stomach, falling to my knees and bracing myself on one hand as the feeling roiled through me. For a good minute I was bent forwards mouth open trying not to retch with my eyes closed. My whole body ached and thrummed with displeasure.

The feeling receded as quickly as it had started and I was left sitting on the floor panting as the scent of flowers permeated the air and bees flew around unconcerned by my nauseous episode. My [Carpenter] Class had only been at level one, it must be god awful to remove a higher-level Class.

It hadn’t lasted long, but why hadn’t anyone mentioned this would happen if I removed a Class? Then again, this reaction to removing a Class was probably fairly common knowledge since school children routinely took and dropped Classes on a weekly basis for apprenticeships.

My breathing slowed and I began to rethink taking [Animal handler]. I mean what could I really gain from that at level 1, I could already direct the bees with [Formation] and I was here to level [Tactician]. Also as short as it was, that minute had dragged on and the nauseas episode had been really really unpleasant.

My legs felt a bit weak as I stood up and my vision went dark for a second before going back to normal. The light headedness receded and the rushing in my ears slowly quieted. I blinked shaking my head a bit trying to get rid of any residual unpleasant feelings.

Sitting back down near my partly constructed hive, I pulled out my lunch and started eating. Using [Formation] I was now able to direct green tinged bees to fly to unoccupied flowers instead of buzzing around me or reaching flowers which already had other bees on them. At first it was strange to plot a path through the air, but not difficult once I got used to it.

They didn’t always fly where I wanted them to, but mostly they followed my orders, but I did notice that I couldn’t persuade them to veer from a job they were already doing, if one bee was flying back to the hive to deliver pollen, I couldn’t get it to turn around to gather more. Maybe at a higher Skill level I’d be able to do that, or bees were just particularly stubborn and dedicated.

A significant portion of bees had landed on the broken frames, which the beekeeper had left on top of the empty damaged hive. Though the vast majority of the bees there were green, and in the process of transporting the honey back into their hive to put on the new frames, blue tinged bees had also landed on the frames and were stealing some of the honey.

Very quickly those bees changed from blue to red.

I stared at the scene unfolding, I’d been preoccupied thinking about bee predators to fight, that I’d completely missed the obvious that since these bees were from different hives, they were all in direct competition with each other. I stuffed the rest of my sandwich into my mouth and barely chewed before swallowing and ran over to the bees in a slow jog so not to alarm them.

Standing I watched them; numerous green bees were focused on gathering their exposed honey to take back to the nest and while they did fight when they encountered bees from another hive, they did miss a lot of bees in their hurry to save as much of their honey as possible.

I left any bees transporting honey back to the hive alone, they could do their job well enough, instead, using [Formation] I focused on those bees already in the process of defending. They would be the easiest to direct to fight since they were already fighting. Though in the whole garden a single hive was outnumbered, on these broken frames, my hive vastly outnumbered the intruders and I made abundant use of that advantage while it lasted.

Grouping fighting worker bees together I directed them towards single red bees, letting them converge to either drive it away or kill it. It was a little gruesome to watch and order bees to murder each other, but they readily launched themselves at the red bees, stinging repeatedly and crowding them until the bees died.

It was difficult to focus on fighting on so many fronts at once but my eyes flickered over the frames time and time again finding red bees and letting workers gang up on them. The mortality rate for red bees was far higher than for green bees since they worked in groups, driving home the advantage in numbers. But slowly that advantage was decreasing as the sweet smell was attracting more and more foreign bees to the site.

Working desperately to protect as much of their hard earned honey as possible, I tried to ensure the survival of green bees while driving away red ones, but it was a race against time as more and more red bees landed, making off with precious honey.

I wasn’t sure how long I but it must have been a while since I slowly felt a headache coming on from the repeated use of [Formation] and I immediately discontinued both [Battle sense] and [Formation]. I rubbed my temple and looked down at the bees, now it just looked like an indistinguishable pile of bees crawling all over the broken frames. I had no idea who was ally or enemy, it just looked like a disorganised mess.

You have reached: [Tactician Lvl 6] You have reached: [Battle sense Lvl 8] You have reached: [Formation Lvl 5]

My irritation washed away and I grinned, that was exactly what I’d hoped for. I looked back down at the bees longingly, this was a fantastic opportunity to level [Tactician] but I had promised myself that if I ever got the first signs of Skill strain, I would stop using Skills for a while. Slightly morose, but excited and sporting a mild headache I walked back to the partly constructed hive. Sitting down, I couldn’t hold back my curiosity anymore and decided to see what new Skills I had.

[Tactician Lvl 6] Skill points: 40 Skills:

[Battle sense Lvl 8]

[Formation Lvl 5]

Skills available:

[Motivational speech] – 10 Skill points

[Convenient environment] – 10 Skill points

[Charming disposition] – 20 Skill points

[Project voice] – 20 Skill points

[Talent seeker] – 30 Skill points

[Massive march] – 30 Skill points

[Quick counter] – 30 Skill points

[Frenzy fight] – 40 Skill points

[Steel carapace] – 50 Skill points

I had been level 4 with 10 Skill points and so far at each level I had gained 10 Skill points, but now I had jumped 2 levels and gained 30 Skill points. Maybe going form level 5 to 6 had given me 20 instead of 10? It would make sense to gain more Skill points the higher level someone was.

I still couldn’t afford [Steel carapace], but I really wanted a new Skill now, undecided I eagerly scanned my options. It was all I could do not to bounce up and down. There were quite a few that looked useful or interesting; this would be easer if I actually knew what any of them did.

There was only one Skill that cost 40, so that had to be the best one I could afford right? Also [Frenzy fight] did look like it would be useful in a fight, I mean it did literally have the word fight in it. I deliberated on whether or not I should wait and gather Skill points but in the end I couldn’t resist getting a new Skill. Hastily I picked it before I could change my mind and closed my eyes, peeking through one a bit to read the description.

[Frenzy fight]

Temporarily increase strength, stamina and effectiveness of offensive Skills while decreasing fear and fatigue of allies.

Following Skill usage, recipient allies will experience a recovery period of increased fatigue and decreased stamina regeneration. [Frenzy fight] cannot be used on recipient allies during this time period.

Note: Results of Skill depends on recipient ally’s current statuses and overall condition. Skill cannot be used on self.

A smile crept over my face, no matter how vague the description was, the gist of the Skill was it would give my allies a brief offensive boost followed by a recovery period where they were more vulnerable. It didn’t say how long the boost or the recovery period lasted but it probably varied depending on what allies I used it on going by the note at the bottom. Hopefully levelling the Skill would mean bigger a bigger boost for longer and a shorter weaker recovery period.

I definitely had to test it some time to see how effective it was, and how did increasing effectiveness of offensive Skills work? I frowned looking over at the bees; honestly I had no idea if bees or any non-sentient being even had a status, or could use Skills for that matter. I mulled it over, its not like they would be able to read a status but if I had one why wouldn’t they? Or was there an intelligence line for qualifying for a status?

I shook my head, I had no way of finding that out without asking someone right now and I didn’t want to look stupid again. A little giggle escaped me, maybe I could just get Daniel to ask the stupid questions. That was a bit mean though, but I hadn’t completely forgiven him so maybe it was appropriate.

Mournfully I closed all panels and restarted work on the hives; as much as I wanted to test it out, if I didn’t do the work I was paid for, I wouldn’t be here much longer. I focused on building the hive and ignoring the buzzing bees that was concentrated around the broken frames. It was still frustrating to miss that opportunity to level.