By the time I reached the main chamber, the primary horde had already returned. Phyllis was holding them off with her plasma thrower, and Doofus stood well clear of the heat, blasting any juvenile yarsps that tried to approach from the egg chamber.

As I jogged toward them, I saw the earth around the tunnel slump. Far too much heat was pouring through the ground, and the top portion of the tunnel was outright melting.

“Phllis!” I shouted, trying to get her attention. She turned, the front of her mech glowing bright orange, and the tunnel’s roof collapsed, slagged yarsp excretions and tons of loose earth and stone tumbling in on top of her and the yarsp horde.

Doofus skittered back as clouds of high-speed dust activated his shields, running over to my side, where he stood and stared back to where Phyllis used to be. A small whine escaped his throat.

The entrance tunnel was completely covered by a smoking landslide. The harder, tile-like excretions had slagged, creating a molten center to the collapse that now covered Phyllis and her mech. Atop that was a smoldering pile of churned earth and loose stone. As I watched, I realized it was still moving.

In several places around the landslide, and from the walls surrounding it, there was movement from the soil. It shook, while small rain showers of dust foretold further trouble.

Yarsps burst through the loose earth, away from the hottest portions of the cooling landslide, and dropped down to charge at us. Some of them shook loose earth from their bodies, others had scorched or melted portions visible on their bodies.

“Stay behind me, Doof!” I yelled as I stepped in front of him. Part of me heard an Afflqwst notification, but it didn’t register with the yarsps coming at us.

The dog started barking rapid fire, using sonic blasts to send yarsps off the platform as they filled the slope and charged directly for us. I braced myself for the oncoming swarm and spared a thought for what would happen to Doofus once I was overwhelmed, as the giant carnivorous wasps rushed down the ramp to our position.

Then they parted, running directly past us. I held both swords out, ready for them to converge and rush over the top of us, but they just kept burrowing free to run right past us. Doofus noticed too, and the barking stopped. He tucked his tail and kept in close to me, but the swarm of yarsps ignored us entirely and charged directly for the tunnel at the far end, the one that led to Tower, the flesh beast.

The queen at the top of the hive had stopped roaring, and as I watched, the flood of carnivorous insects petered out and stopped. Those who had survived the attack on Silken Sands, and then my bodyguard, were focused entirely on acquiring fresh meat from their unlimited source. Looking at the queen again, I understood.

There was no way for her to feed herself, and she must have required a constant stream of vomited meat in order to even maintain her own body, let alone lay new eggs. The swarm was like her limbs, she needed some of them alive and active to even survive.

I shook my head and pulled up the Afflqwst notification I had ignored a moment before.

Quest Completed – Prepare your affiliate for an upcoming wild animal attack, scheduled to take place during your absence.

REQUIREMENTS:

1. Draft plan of battle. (complete)

2. Modify structural defenses. (complete)

3. Affiliate must survive attack. (complete)

4. (Optional) Say final goodbyes to important affiliate members. (failed)

REWARD – Credit level upgrade.

We had beaten the hive. I sighed in relief and swiped the app away. Phyllis was buried in melted giant wasp shit and molten earth. The landslide her weapon had caused still smoldered, and I recoiled from the heat.

After staring at the smoking heap of loose soil, I remembered my phone and grabbed at it, telling the psychic deity within to call my friend.

To my immense relief, Phyllis answered after the third ring. “Yes, dearie?” she asked sweetly.

“Holy shit Phill, you okay?” I asked. Her image in my helmet was small and difficult to see, and it was dark. Smoke wreathed around her form and throughout the interior of the mech, obscuring further detail.

“It’s hot in here, but I’m comfy otherwise,” she answered. “Are you planning on digging me out at all? Something’s wrong with my suit, it won’t move anymore.”

“Yeah, Phill, I’m gonna dig you out as soon as I can get close to the landslide you’re under. It’s still way too hot for me and Doof, I can’t even get near,” I told her.

“Oh well, take your time then, I suppose,” Phyllis huffed.

I shook my head and looked back up to the queen. “I’m gonna go get our bounty, Phill. How’s a third of fifty-million morties sound?”

“What’s my cut for the sales?” she immediately asked.

The page scrolled, seemingly forever, when I tried to check for her. Thankfully, I didn’t need to go through each singular sale of bodies and eggs, I was able to skip to the end and get a total.

We’d crashed the local market again, selling too much. The price per unit plummeted by the end of our productive morning. Thankfully Rayna had done most of the better sales for the affiliate early on, before my little trio got started in the hive. By the time we were selling chitin ash and burnt blackened leavings, nobody in the immediate area was buying yarsp for breakfast anymore anyway. It was all going to industrial uses, or even further breakdown into plain carbon.

Even if nobody else was buying, BuyMort itself would always buy for use as basic carbon.

All said, we’d made nine million morties to split between the three of us. There were a few more sales to be made, but the primary bulk had come from the eggs anyway. “Three million,” I told Phyllis.

She nodded, and the screen cut off as she disconnected the call. I narrowed my eyes but shrugged and focused on the task at hand. The old lady probably just wanted to smoke her weed in peace.

I pulled up my map and focused on the queen's chamber. The bounty drone pinged at us from the ceiling directly over the queen’s head, in the rock ceiling above her. I looked into her black, soulless eyes and sighed as she stared directly back at me.

Getting the drone was not as horrible as I had thought it would be. The queen lifted her bulk and backed away as I approached, following the ramp her young used to feed her. She had to stop at the edge of it, or risk tearing her thorax and egg sack loose, but I felt that if I came too much closer, she might try it.

I held my plasma falchion at my side, ready to flare into scalding life as I slowly and carefully approached.

A few of the yarsps feeding her moved in to attack me as I stepped up the ramp, but I ignited the falchion and held it up at them.

Normally yarsps charged, unheeding of damage, but they hesitated. They merely walled me in, forming up in a group around me and trying to keep their bodies between me and the queen.

And then BuyMort kicked in. A flurry of ads swarmed my vision, throwing me off balance. I saw ballerinas dancing, racecars blasting forward, two men circling each other around an arena . . . . it was just a straight-up furious onslaught of ads with no meaning or purpose.

In front of them all, a red shield icon appeared, white words in all caps decorating its surface.

TIRED OF ADVERTISEMENTS BLURRING YOUR VISION WHEN YOU NEED IT THE MOST?

Beneath the shield was the simple line Y/N. No matter where I looked, the shield followed. I could barely see the yarsps quivering in hungry anger beyond.

“Shit,” I yelled before selecting the Y with my thoughts. The text on the shield morphed and changed.

SAY NO TO ADS AND YES TO LIFE! INTRODUCING JP ADBLOCKER BY WONKA’S WETWARE INDUSTRIES. OUR UNIQUE TRANSPLANTABLE DEVICE TRANSCENDS SPACE AND TIME TO DELAY ADVERTISEMENT RELAY TO YOUR CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM BY UP TO FOUR HOURS! *CONDITIONS APPLY *VISIT WONKA’S WETWARE INDUSTRIES TO ORDER THE ONE THAT FITS YOU TODAY! 3.7 stars. Price at site.

Something bit at my leg, a tentative chomp that seemed more probing than malicious, and I kicked it away immediately. The yarsps were starting to close in. I frantically waved away the ad, and after a brief bit of stubborn resistance it went away, the others following it into oblivion.

My vision free, I saw that I was hemmed in.

I blinked rapidly, switching my focus between the yarsps at my front, the line of them that had formed at my back, the queen herself, and the minimap in my helmet. Once I was directly underneath the drone, I simply leapt to the ceiling and grabbed it.

My account immediately flooded with morties, cycling all the way up to five-huindred million. I smiled at the number, but instantly dumped it into the communal fund, which BuyMort was going to cut into thirds and send to both Phyllis’ and Doofus’ accounts. For a small fee of course. Nothing in BuyMort is free.

Still, the bounty being paid felt sweet. Dearth paid us five-hundred million, and we didn’t even kill the queen for them. Ripping off this affiliate felt great. Walking back down the ramp and getting away from the queen and her yarsps felt even better. She stared at me no matter where I went though, so I did my best to ignore her and got to work digging out Phyllis.

Her mech was sealed in place, in a cocoon of melted yarsp excretion. Once I had dug deep enough, I could see the shape of her, melted to the floor. It was still hot too, once I uncovered it, the entire patch cooled visibly.

By the time I had used my sword to free her limbs enough to free the rest of herself, two hours had passed, and I was ravenous. Doofus was laying at the foot of the landslide, head resting on his crossed paws as he monitored the yarsps for us. They did nothing but feed their queen.

Entire lines of them dragged back fresh meat from Tower, the perfect physical being. Once the meat was in place, the young yarsps would feast on it, and grow.

Before my eyes they began to solidify, color filling in their limbs as exoskeleton grew and stretched with echoing pops.

Once they were fully grown within an hour, those yarsps joined the march to meat and back, vomiting recently devoured flesh pulp into their queen’s open mouth. Eventually, she began laying eggs again.

Once Phyllis’ weapon arm was free, she fired up her plasma blade and cut herself out of the rest of the landslide. The yarsp dung, when melted down and allowed to re-solidify, was as hard as tempered steel. Phyllis’ mech hadn’t been able to generate enough momentum to break any of its moveable parts free, which had trapped her in the suffocating heat.

As the suit’s head broke free, Phyllis flipped the helmet open. Steam billowed out into the chamber, and between the thick clouds of it, I caught a glimpse of my friend.

She was shriveled, boiled, burned by the steam all over her body. Her thin shift had caught fire and incinerated while trapped between her body and the machine. She had no hair left at all, and her face appeared to be partially melting from her skull, one eye covered entirely by a flap of sloughing skin.

She took a deep breath of the air in the hive and sighed, with a nod.

“Phyllis?” I asked, carefully approaching.

The more the steam cleared, the more I could see the horrific damage done to the old woman’s body. She had been broiled inside the suit, its internal systems unable to compensate for its weapons' extreme heat production.

Still, Phyllis turned to glare at me and held her bag of joints aloft. It was filled with blackened ash in the partially melted bag. “All my weed got burnt!” she whined.

I blinked and nodded. “Are you okay?” I asked again.

The old woman in the suit huffed and glared down at me. “No, Tyson. I am annoyed, my weed is all burnt up, and I can’t feel my face anymore. The stupid suit is doing something to me again too,” she muttered, ducking down inside. “Oh good, I’m a horrifying mess. Melted like a candle, isn’t that lovely?”

“Uh,” I added to the conversation.

“Yes, Tyson, I am fine. This beauty seems to be able to keep me tickin’,” she said, adding under her breath, “not that I’m sure any of this is real, of course.”

I ignored that last part, just happy she seemed nearly as difficult to kill as me. Significantly better armed, but that seemed to have its drawbacks too. I skimmed right past her questioning the nature of reality. Nothing I could do to help there.

With a wave of my hand, I divided the morties and sent Doofus and Phyllis their cuts. Five-hundred and nine million cut three ways ended in a repeating number, which I ate by giving each of them slightly more than myself. I did very little of the work anyway, the hardest part of my job was trying to get the bounty drone without hurting the queen.

Phyllis helped us dig our way out, before climbing back up through the tunnel network and hiking out of the gaping holes in the mountain. By the time we made it back to the truck, I was ravenously hungry. My bodyguard had gotten a fresh shipment of marijuana cigarettes from BuyMort and was happily smoking one, her partially melted features wobbling at me while she walked the parking lot.

“What do you think breakfast will be,” she asked me.

“I can’t imagine it won’t be yarsp,” I sighed, easing into the truck. It was a good thing Axle had set aside several pairs of these silk pants for me, I had gaping tears in the set I was wearing, again. The thought that we had set back the development of the hive significantly gave me some hope though.

It was unlikely they would recover enough to attack us again for a few days, and by then, I was hoping to have something in place to contain them. With that flesh creature as its source of unlimited meat, our hive would be an excellent source of food. I could make good on my promise to feed the militia, even.

Plus, that way it felt less like we were eating Tower.

Doofus plodded up to the truck and climbed aboard, happily curling up in the backseat and promptly going to sleep. It was more exercise than he was used to, but he seemed happy, going directly into deep sleep and twitchy-footed dreams.

Rayna had been doing her own work with the hobbs after the battle, but she kept our line open.

“Rayna,” I said, breathing hard.

“Yeah boss?” she immediately grunted.

“We’re on our way back. Watch for retaliation from Dearth,” I wheezed.

“Got it boss,” she said. I saw her hesitate, looking at me through the phone. “Hey boss. Glad we met you.”

I chuckled. In spite of it all, she was glad to have met me. “No Rayna, I’m glad we found you. Looking forward to that hobb barbeque this morning, that’s for sure.”

She nodded at me, with a faint smile. “See you soon.”

I disconnected and leaned out the empty door frame to shout at Phyllis, “Let’s go! You can smoke on the road.”

“I can smoke where I please, thank you,” the partially melted old lady muttered.

She piloted her mech to the truck, clanking up and over the tailgate. Doofus woke up and stared out his window at her while she arduously got settled in the back of the pickup, in a chorus of groans, creaks, and sudden shifts in the truck’s suspension.

Once she was settled with a trail of pot smoke rising into the Arizona morning, we got on the road.