While we had been focused on the single entrance thinking that because I didn’t hear the flight of more yellow jackets, there weren’t any more around us. They snuck up on the ground. If they had been flying, then we would have heard them coming and been ready, perhaps even have found their other hole and taken them as they came. As it was, they had proven to be smarter than I had given them credit for.

When I had turned to the sound, I saw ten yellow jackets walking toward us. When they saw that they had been noticed, they all took flight before I could even take a step.

I yelled, “Blink they’re behind us!” As I turned.

I was stunned for a moment by the noise of all the wings. It was as loud here as when I took a helicopter ride, and the amount of wind seemed to be abnormally large. The loose twigs and leaves started to move around the ground as the yellow jackets began to fly in a circle around us, whipping up even more debris from the ground and causing a quickly formed cyclone.

Dirt and other small bits flew up into my eyes, causing me to close them. Then I felt a stinger impact on my back. As with the one that attacked my chest, this stinger couldn’t get through my armor, but it didn’t stop it from trying. I was trying to reach over my back with my left arm to grab the monster off my back when a stinger entered my exposed side.

I picked up an envenomed debuff and a breathing debuff as my left lung was punctured by the sting. My whole left side was burning in pain as I felt the next sting bounce off a link of the mail. I stopped trying to reach the one on my back and went for the one on my side. I pinched it between my arm and side and then brought my sword around to strike it. I felt the thing pop with the blow, but it kept trying to bite me.

While the training was for fire, I figured that the best way to get the one on my back off was to stop, drop, and roll. So I flung myself onto my back and felt through the armor the bug exterior as it gave out. Then I rolled over, which finished knocking the half a bug off my side. I couldn’t see anything from the wind storm they brought up around us.

I sheathed my sword, fumbled a healing potion out of my shield, and saw my lung get fixed. Next, I downed a cure poison and saw that the venom debuff had vanished. I put my left hand over my eyes with my fingers just slightly open and squinted. Then I drew my sword again and started to try to advance toward the edge of the cyclone. The yellow jackets weren’t very high as they were circling us. It was likely a group area attack spell that they were using to keep us pinned down as more came.

It took me a few moments to break through the area that spell was affecting. It was another one of those odd things about magic. Most of the spells had clear stopping points, a line where it would just drop off. In this case, the inside of the circle was a dust storm, and there wasn’t even a breeze as soon as I was out of it.

I looked up and saw that the first ten had been joined by at least the same number again, all flying their loop around their hive’s opening. Then, beyond the yellow jackets, I saw an excellent line of clouds moving my way in the sky. I grinned and fished the runes for rot rain from my pouch at my hip.

I thought to Blink, “I am about to drop a rot rain get out of there.”

Her response sent a chill up my spine. Whereas I got out of the wind storm, she went to ground. She sent me a shot from her eyes of the inside of the hive. She was killing her way through to the queen.

I grinned; she should be fine for the rot rain. I started my cast and then tossed the runes which would anchor the spell into the wind storm. Then watched as the clouds just at the edge of my vision changed locations to above the hive and then started to slowly rain out rot.

The yellow jackets were so used to things hitting them from their own spell that it took them a while to notice what was happening. Their wings, as the most delicate part of the overgrown flying dealers of hate, were the first thing that went. It was a loosing of the bond that held the wings in place. Then the first one fell. It wasn’t much, but as it hit the ground, there was still enough wind that its wings got ripped off.

After the first one, a group fell down. I couldn’t tell how many dropped out of the sky because of the mess of the spells, but I saw several. Then, even more, it wasn’t long before the windstorm stopped, and the rain was all that was going. Finally, after a few more moments, the rain stopped, and there were dozens of wingless insects crawling around.

Most of the yellow jackets had a brownish, almost molted look to their once lustering yellow. Several even had legs collapsing under their weight. I advanced with my sword out; it was time to finish off these monsters and then move on.

Half an hour after I finished the yellow jackets on the surface, Blink came back up. “Hunts dones,” she said as she looked around. There was goop hanging from her claws and down the spines on her back.

“Hop in the river and get cleaned off. Then we can head down to the next spot.” I said as I started to head toward the river myself.

Blink dived right into the river. It was only a few feet deep in this part and seemed to be spreading out as it was in a valley now and not a deep gorge like it was near the waterfall. After a few minutes, we were both heading back downriver. Now that the yellow jackets were removed, this area should have been relatively peaceful.

Blink and I started to head downriver; this time, I was paying attention to the ground. The things that I wanted to do would take much longer here. There was a mix of stone and dirt, so to get rid of everything, I would need to change the dirt to stone, then the stone to dirt; after that, I could turn the dirt to water and then to steam. Add into that the trees were massive, and the roots covered the ground.

We traveled for the next couple of hours as we went; nothing much bugged us. The trees were getting bigger the further down river we went, and there weren’t tracks of any predators that I saw. I almost thought that it was a fluke that we got as close to the yellow jackets as we did before we saw them because the area here just felt empty. I could only guess that it was from the nest we took out.

The river, at this point, had widened out and deepened quite a bit. I had crossed over two more small streams and seen another river the same size join this one. The land beside the river was getting harder to walk near, and so I headed further into the forest to avoid the soft ground.

There hadn’t been in clearing in hours; the tall trees in this area had choked out most of the underbrush, and we were left with the full shade-loving plants. This change was pleasant in that my line of sight had increased a great deal. However, because these trees were massive, it meant that the roots in the area would also be massive.

As such, we cut the day a bit shorter than I wanted because I found a fallen tree. I knew that there would still be roots, but I figured that it would be better to work where the tree wasn’t still living. That being said, it was just as hard as I thought that it would be. The roots, while old, weren’t easy to break or cut. I needed a way to turn the tree into dirt if I was going to keep this up. However, this whole thing was only going to be a few days, so it didn’t really matter too much.

This room took me twice as long to build, and so it was close to midnight by the time I finished making enough room to settle down in. However, the roots were a big issue; the other problem was the way the land had changed. Just like the last one, there were stones intermixed with the dirt, so my wands couldn’t clear everything out in a single go. Which, in turn, meant that I had to wait for my mana to recharge.

This time it wasn’t too bad waiting as I had so much work to remove roots. Add into the root problem there was a low water table, which meant that I had to seal the whole area. It was a long night, and I was a little worried that the next day my room would turn into a pool with how much water was nearby.

That night I dreamed. It had been a long time since I had a dream of the wild human.