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Chapter Text

The Busy Bee Has No Time for Sorrow

June, 2027.

A light fell from the sky. Not a star, not a meteor. Something older, hungrier. It struck the earth in silence, burying itself in a Texan bee yard.

From the crater crawled a blue mass, shapeless, pulsing, wet with thought. It slid toward a hive. The queen twitched once before it fastened to her, and in that moment, she was gone. Her body remained, but her will was erased. Her workers hummed in a new rhythm, a single vibration that spread across the hive like a plague.

The bees began to build. Scrap metal was stolen from sheds. Wire stripped from power lines. Appliances torn apart. Wax became mortar. Honeycomb hardened into an alloy. The hive swelled, its walls breathing, its chambers echoing with a low, endless hum.

The blue mass grew too. Stripes tore across its skin. Fur sprouted in patches, wrong in texture and weight. Its wings unfolded, not with the frail shimmer of an insect's, but with the serrated screech of razors. It was learning shape, not mimicry, but evolution.

Reports began. Hives vanishing. Families gone without a trace. Cattle were husked in the fields, their fluids siphoned away. No evidence left, save for the hum that lingered in the air, rattling the bones of those who listened too long.

When it revealed itself, it was already far beyond comprehension. Not three feet. Not thirty. It towered, a black-and-gold monolith moving against the sky. Its eyes gleamed like fractured glass, each facet reflecting humanity back as prey. Its stinger gleamed like a pike dipped in venom that glistened with colors the human eye was not meant to see.

The Pentagon collapsed beneath its weight, and when it rose again, it carried more than stolen steel. It bristled with weapons welded into its shell. Energy shields shimmered over its body in the shape of a honeycomb. Smaller bees spilled from its body, no longer honey-makers but carrion feeders, their mandibles red with blood. Rockets dissolved against its humming shield, a honeycomb of light that stretched impossibly far. Those who stood their ground were fed upon and drained through a spiraling maw of teeth that seemed to descend forever. Screams cut short, but the chewing never stopped.

By then, the creature was the height of a skyscraper and the width of a warship. Planes chased it across California, but it outflew them easily. Bullets pattered off its hide like rain. Rockets fizzled against the humming shield. Cities burned beneath its shadow. Half the state was consumed before the sun set. And then the smaller ones came. Not honey bees. Not anymore. They dripped with blood, mandibles clicking in reverence as they drank. They swarmed the corpses of soldiers, bloated themselves, and returned inside their queen. Each came back changed. Each came back worse.

The creature did not attack in fury, nor strategy. It simply consumed. Houses, cars, forests, all reduced to husks. Its wings churned the air like turbines, pulling roofs from homes, dragging people upward into the feeding spiral. Half the state vanished before anyone could flee.

And still, it grew.

Storms followed in its path. Winds screamed, trees bent until they cracked, skies blackened as if the earth itself recoiled. Yet the bee did not falter. It turned its colossal body toward the Pacific, wings droning like funeral bells.

When North Korean jets intercepted, their pilots screamed in disbelief:

"도대체 이게 뭐야!?" — What the hell is this!?

It did not answer. One swipe of its wing tore a jet in half. The rest were sucked screaming into its maw, their cries vanishing into a pit of grinding teeth.

On the ground, soldiers fired until their barrels glowed. Their bullets rattled harmlessly across its armor. When it stung, venom seared through veins, boiling blood, tearing screams from throats until silence fell. If the bee could laugh, it would have.

And still the workers swarmed, scavenging weapons, feeding the brood inside. No longer honey bees, now vulture things, slick with gore, reverent in their feeding.

The great bee rose again, swollen with blood and iron. Its wings spun in vast circles, lifting it higher, higher, until the sky darkened beneath its shadow.

It was not a monster.

It was a hive remembering itself.

And humanity was nothing but nectar.

The world watched. And in watching, I understood.

This was not an invasion. This was not a conquest. This was a revelation. Humanity had mistaken itself for dominant, blind to the truth humming beneath its feet. The hive had always been greater. Older. Patient. Now awakened, it had remembered us.

Storms gathered in its path. Winds bent trees until they snapped. The sky blackened as if recoiling. Pilots screamed in every language as they vanished into its maw. Guns jammed. Rockets failed. Cities emptied into silence.

And still, it came.

It did not hurry. It did not flee. It simply existed, and existence was enough to unmake us.The buzzing never stopped. Not outside. Not inside. Those who survived long enough to tell the tale claimed they still heard it in their skulls, in their marrow, in the spaces between their thoughts.

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

Only hunger.

Chapter Text

LOCATION: [REDACTED], NATO Joint Command Bunker
ATTENDEES: U.S., U.K., France, Spain, South Korea, assorted scientists & military brass
STATUS: Emergency Session

The world was a mess. Jax knew it, the soldiers knew it, hell, even the politicians knew it but wouldn't admit it out loud. A skyscraper-sized bee was tearing across the planet, sucking people dry, bolting weapons into its body like Lego pieces, and shrugging off missiles like mosquito bites.

The "secure" underground base where the world's leaders now huddled smelled of stale coffee and panic. Screens flickered with looping footage from the Pentagon—soldiers shooting wildly, tanks firing point-blank, and then only silence, only chewing.

"WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?" an American official shouted, slamming his fist on the table. The footage repeated again, the bee peeling open concrete walls like wrapping paper. His voice cracked halfway through, turning the question into a plea.

"What caused this?" demanded a Korean minister through his translator, his tone somewhere between fury and disbelief.

"We don't know," one scientist muttered. His voice was as thin as his tie. "The... technology we've observed suggests it's extraterrestrial in nature."

The minister barked out a laugh that rang hollow. "Aliens? That is childish nonsense!"

The room might've agreed, if not for the soldier who rushed in and whispered to an aide. The aide's face drained of blood before he stammered out: "Live feed. The creature has entered Europe."

The screen changed. Silence fell.

The bee filled the frame, larger now, dwarfing the city skyline, its wings dragging shadows like storm clouds. With every pulse of the honeycomb shimmer around it, fighter jets simply dropped out of the sky. No explosions. Just dead metal falling.

A Spanish scientist leaned forward, knuckles white against the table.
"De mis observaciones, señor... la abeja tiene un pulso electromagnético dentro de su ser."
(From my observations, sir... the bee has an EMP inside its body.)

The translator relayed it. The room erupted.

"Nuclear strike."
"Bioweapons."
"Coordinate every army at once-"
"-we can't even get the internet to stay online during a storm, you want a global operation?!"

Someone muttered, "I can't believe the end of the world is a goddamn bug," and a few soldiers chuckled nervously before the sound died.

The French general rubbed his temples. "We are ants planning against a boot. Worse-against another ant. A larger ant."

The British delegate coughed into his hand. "Well. At least it's an honest day's work for pest control."

No one laughed.

Jax sat back, watching the shouting. Every plan sounded bold, decisive, official even, but they all knew the truth. Humanity's weapons were pea-shooters. Their strategies were paperwork. None of it mattered against the hum that rattled the air above them.

But soldiers don't get to admit defeat. Leaders don't get to shrug and walk away. So they planned. Because what else could they do?

10/25/27

The bunker air was stale, filled with sweat and recycled oxygen, a hundred bodies all trying not to breathe too loudly as the footage played again. The bee was the size of an office block now, its wings shimmering like molten glass as it tore through farmland in France. Entire armored divisions looked like ants scattering before it, tanks flipped end over end with the casual swipe of one impossibly strong leg.

General Carter pinched the bridge of his nose. "All right," he muttered, his voice raw. "Here's our grand plan."

No one laughed.

"Step one," Carter began, gesturing at the map spread across the wall, "we bait the bastard. Automated convoys blasting out high-frequency signals, supposedly the sound of a hive. The eggheads swear it'll piss it off or lure it in. Or both. Maybe it ignores us, maybe it learns what we're doing and comes back twice as angry. Either way, we're rolling the dice."

The room stayed silent, the weight of every gamble already pressing on their shoulders.

"Step two: blinding. Orbital platforms will open fire in sequence. Think of it like a strobe light on steroids..hit the shield grid again and again until it cracks. In theory." Carter's jaw tightened. "In practice? We're burning the last of our satellites on what might just be the world's most expensive bug zapper."

A colonel in the back snorted but quickly coughed it down when the general's glare swept over him.

"Step three," Carter continued, his voice flat now. "We hit it with everything. Bunker busters, penetrator warheads, experimental ordnance so classified I can't say the names out loud. If it bleeds, we'll find out here. If it doesn't... then we're out of spears."

On the projector, the bee shifted its wings, and a hundred sets of eyes tracked the movement like prey watching a predator in the dark.

"Step four," Carter said grimly. "Gas and fire. VX saturation followed by incendiary sweep. Everything within two hundred kilometers becomes unlivable. Hope you don't like wine from Bordeaux, because it'll glow in the dark by the time we're done."

The Spanish delegate whispered a curse under his breath.

"And step five..." Carter hesitated, the word hanging like a death sentence. "Omega Contingency. Nuclear release. Coordinated strikes. End of the world as we know it, but maybe...just maybe! The bee dies with us."

A young private, who hadn't yet learned when to shut his mouth, whispered just loudly enough for the room to hear: "Has anyone even tried... bug spray?"

The silence that followed was worse than laughter. No one turned. No one smiled.

Carter just stared at the map, his voice dropping to a whisper. "That's the best humanity has to offer."

The soldiers responded on instinct, the ancient call drilled into them, though the words sounded hollow now:
"SIR, YES, SIR!"

Their voices were sharp. Their faces were pale. Jax caught one mutter under his breath as they marched out: "We're about to swat God with a newspaper."

The commander didn't correct him.

Somewhere above, the buzzing never stopped.

And in that moment, with the world's most powerful armies reduced to hoping their "strobe light and bug spray" plan might save them, everyone in that bunker felt the truth press down:

They weren't hunters. They weren't defenders.
They were prey.

Chapter Text

The dark was alive with screaming.

In the shadows, something wet tore. A soldier's body was split in half like parchment, his spine snapped in two as the great bee's mandibles worked with surgical precision. Blood sprayed against the steel belly of the blimp, and from the gash poured smaller bees, thousands of them, slipping out like a living tide. They swarmed low to the ground, their wings shrieking in unison as they descended on corpses, plunging their needle-like proboscises into soft tissue. They drank greedily, their abdomens swelling red and glistening, while others chewed flesh straight from bone.

The first was Corporal Harris. He raised his rifle, firing wildly, and one of them clamped down on his arm. Mandibles the size of knives dug into the muscle, crunching through bone like sugar cane. He screamed, and before anyone could help, another bee drove its barbed legs into his abdomen, pinning him upright as if for dissection. Then they began to pull. Two, three, five of them working in concert, wings buzzing like a bone saw. They tore his arm clean off, arterial spray misting in the smoke. One bee shoved its head into his open stomach cavity, tearing through intestines, dragging them out like a bundle of ropes. Harris collapsed in pieces.

Private Kwon tried to run. They overtook him in seconds, grappling him down. Instead of killing him quickly, they pinned his limbs wide and shoved their ovipositors into his exposed throat. Not to sting, but to pump. His neck bulged grotesquely as liquefied enzymes flooded his esophagus. He gagged, choking as his tissues dissolved inside him. Then the bees bent low, their tongues flicking out, lapping the slurry that bubbled from his mouth. “God- God- ” Lieutenant Perry broke ranks, firing, screaming. The tracer rounds lit up the night, one, two, three bees down, but the swarm surged onto him. He went down under a living tide, his voice swallowed by the buzz. When the others tried to pull him free, they only managed to grab his boots. What came out wasn’t a man anymore...just a hollow shell, skin sagging where everything beneath had been chewed away.

And still the swarm moved on.

Private Lasky never saw the first one land. He just felt the thud against his backplate, like someone had dropped a hammer on him. Then another. Then another. By the time he spun around, the swarm was already on him. “Get it off! GET IT OFF!” he screamed, voice shrill over comms. His squad opened fire, but the bees were too fast, darting, weaving, piling on in a blur of black-and-gold armor and wet, snapping mandibles. They didn’t sting him. That would’ve been merciful. Instead, they clung to him, dozens, then hundreds, beating their wings in unison.

The sound was a shriek of air, a rising whine that made fillings buzz in teeth. His armor’s thermal sensors went haywire, screaming red warnings. “HOLY SHIT- they’re cooking him!” someone yelled. Lasky’s shrieks curdled into inhuman noises as the swarm boiled the heat inside his suit. Steam vented from his joints, a reek of scorched flesh slipping through the filters. He dropped to the ground, thrashing like a man on fire, but the bees only pressed harder, their wings a furnace. When the noise finally cut off, the swarm shifted as one. His body twitched once, twice, then went still. And then they fed. Mandibles sawed through composite armor as if it were foil, cracking open his chestplate. Wet, tearing noises followed, a grisly feast muffled only by the relentless buzz. A soldier, their soldier, was stripped like carrion in seconds.

The smell was unbearable: coppery blood, bile, and the stench of split-open intestines mixed with the sweet, honey-thick rot that clung to every bee's body. Soldiers tried to hold their positions, but the line faltered the moment the queen emerged.

She crawled out of the great bee's thorax, a monstrous thing only a foot tall but nearly as wide, her chitin gleaming with a wet sheen, her wings frayed like torn paper. Her mandibles clicked in the silence before snapping down on the throat of a screaming private. With a single bite, she ripped his larynx free, holding the cartilage between her jaws like a trophy. The man tried to scream but could only gurgle, blood bubbling from his mouth. The queen fed leisurely on the ragged hole of his neck, then thrust her ovipositor downward like a dagger.

Bees poured into his open mouth. They funneled down his throat, buzzing violently inside his chest cavity, chewing their way into his lungs. The soldier's eyes bulged; he flailed, his legs kicking against the dirt as he convulsed, suffocating on the swarm inside him. Each desperate gasp only dragged more bees deeper until his chest rattled like a wasp's nest. He collapsed, still twitching. The queen scuttled away, already searching for her next victim.

Gunfire cracked in the distance. Muzzle flashes lit the black sky in bursts of orange. Octavian stood barefoot in his pajamas, tall and lean, eyes like shards of ice. His pistol barked against the dark, each round hammering into the advancing colossus of fur and chitin. For a moment, he thought it might be enough. Then came the fire.

"Stay down!" someone screamed, but Octavian didn't heed the warning. He fired again. And again. Bullets tore into the body of a giant bee lumbering toward him, black ichor spraying in bursts across the ground. But the creature did not fall.

Click. Empty.

Pain like a burning blade tore across his stomach. He staggered, reached down with trembling fingers, and felt the shredded edge of his pajama shirt, soaked and sticking. Something wet, warm, and impossibly heavy slid against his palm. They coiled around his hands like slick ropes, steaming in the night air. His intestines. His gaze lifted just in time to see the bee looming above, its mandibles snapping wide. His breath caught in his throat. His knees buckled.

Octavian dropped them at once, horror etched across his pale face. Blood gushed down his legs, spattering onto the packed dirt, pooling beneath him. The bee towered only a foot away now, its compound eyes glistening with hunger. "I'm going to die." The thought rang through his skull like a bell. His mind, once sharp and unyielding, fell silent for the first time in his life. The bee loomed above him, wings humming like a thousand knives. Then came the final pain: two sharp, crushing grips on either side of his head. Its mandibles dug into his skull and tore.

The world split open with him.

Octavian's scream choked off mid-breath as bone cracked, and a fountain of blood sprayed across the dirt. His body twitched once, twice, then went still. The bee released what was left, uninterested. The man's heart had stopped. The game was over.

The buzzing grew louder. All at once, the swarm converged, reforming around the monstrous invader. With a low drone, the giant bee lifted into the air, carrying with it the stench of carnage

The swarm regrouped, lifting into the night. The Queen turned north, across the Atlantic. She pondered the silence: no jets, no bombs, no vengeance. Humans, she knew, were violent, war-driven, ruthless when cornered. But perhaps at last they had learned. Perhaps they had accepted their place. Her kind had been stinging humanity into submission for weeks. Her planet was twenty times as advanced. Why should she ever fear these fragile creatures?

The bee felt a flicker of satisfaction. Humanity had not struck back. No jets, no missiles, no firestorms from the sky. The humans had finally surrendered, or simply learned their place. They were weak, fragile, easy to split open, and drink dry.

And yet...

From what the creature had observed, humans were dangerous when cornered. Vengeful, war-driven, ruthless in their desperation. They built bombs that burned cities and guns that spat fire like angry stars. They should have fought harder. They should have sent more.

But they hadn't.

Perhaps, at last, they had understood.

The bee's thoughts hummed with joy as it flew out across the dark sea. The night was perfect for a bee.

The bee's thoughts were uninterrupted for once, no jets in the sky, no bombs on its back. For the first time in years, the creature grew content. The humans had finally learned their place, or so it believed. It let out a low, droning hum that rippled over the Atlantic, as if laughing. Took them long enough.

But on dark, silent waters, humanity was sharpening its last spear.

The plan had been laid out so many times that Robin could recite it in his sleep. Step one: bait the monster. Step two: blind it. Step three: everything we had left. Step four: burn the world if we had to. Simple on paper, impossible in practice. And now, sitting strapped into the belly of a glider rattling in the carrier's hangar, Robin finally admitted to himself, this was it.

His hands wouldn't stop shaking. He tried to steady them against the steel bulkhead, but even that trembled, as if the ship itself shared his nerves. Across from him, Jax was checking his rifle like the thing would make a difference against something the size of a mountain. Robin envied that calm, that false sense of control. He didn't have it.

Instead, he thought of Anna's laugh, how it bubbled up in the kitchen when he burned the toast. He thought of his daughter's tiny fingers curling around his thumb, and the bedtime story he never finished reading. His youngest, still learning how to form sentences. He tried to imagine them safe, untouched, living in a world that wasn't under the shadow of a buzzing titan. He couldn't. The sound of engines and the distant thrum of the carrier couldn't drown out the phantom of wings that shook the sky.

On the ocean, battleships hummed with restrained power. Carriers groaned under the weight of gliders and bombers. Somewhere in the chaos, Robin ran with Jax, boots hammering on steel as klaxons wailed. They dove into the cramped cockpit of a glider, every breath shallow with terror. Robin couldn't admit it aloud, but the fear ate at him; this mission could cost him his life. Still, it was better him than the human race.

The fleet gathered in the North Atlantic, waiting like prey in ambush. Then, on the horizon, a vast fuzzy body rose into view, eclipsing the sun. Officers scrambled, radios cracked with static, and the air turned heavy with dread.

The intercom crackled: "Three minutes to launch."

His stomach turned cold. Three minutes to leave behind everything he loved. Three minutes to play his part in a suicide mission dressed up as a strategy. He almost laughed, bitter, sharp. What were humans against something like this? They had tanks, warships, bombers, and it all added up to throwing pebbles at a god.

Still, he slid his visor down and gripped the harness. Better him than his wife. Better him than his little girls. If his blood bought them a future, hell, even one more day, then maybe the terror clawing at his insides was worth it.

The glider bay doors groaned open, revealing the black stretch of the Atlantic. Somewhere beyond that horizon, a shadow waited, wings blotting out the sun, patient as death itself.

Robin whispered a prayer he wasn't sure he believed anymore. Then the launch clamps released, and the glider dropped into the storm.

Captain Ben stared at the abomination through reinforced glass. How could it be so large? How did it know to move with such uncanny instinct? His thoughts were interrupted by the hiss of the door and Lieutenant Ashton slipping inside.

Across the horizon, automated convoys roared to life, spewing out high-frequency signals, digital mimicry of a hive. The sound cut through the night. The bee's head twitched. Then it turned, wings stirring storms. It was coming.

Orbital platforms fired, streaks of light tearing across the sky. Flashes hammered the bee's shimmering shield again and again, until cracks spiderwebbed across the barrier. The air stank of ozone as the shield wavered, struggling to hold. Nobody cheered.

The sea shook as every ship emptied its magazines. 406mm shells screamed upward, followed by bunker busters, penetrator warheads, and weapons so classified the crews weren't told their names. The bee faltered, slammed back by the weight of fire, its wings buzzing in fury. But it didn't fall. It roared, a sound that vibrated bones and cracked teeth, and lashed out with beams of energy that shattered shield grids and boiled the sea to steam.

Through the chaos, Robin's glider dove. Ahead, the Ark Royal unleashed its special armor-piercing rounds in quick succession, one shattered the outer web, another crushed the emitter, a third ripped open a wound in the bee's defenses.

The gliders slipped into the wound, a tunnel of quivering flesh. Flying through it felt like plunging down a throat. The smell was unbearable: rot, acid, honey gone sour. Strange fluids sprayed against the cockpit, sizzling against the glass. Living turrets spat barbed projectiles that whistled past. Robin clenched the stick and prayed.

He thought of Anna, her laugh when she burned dinner on late nights. He thought of Ellie, his little girl, clutching her teddy bear tight the day he left for deployment, promising she'd still remember his face when he came back. He thought of Sam, barely three, still learning words, whose first real sentence had been: Daddy stay.

"God, don't let me die here. Not like this."

But he knew he would.

Robin's squad dropped their payloads, thorium bombs vanishing into the pulsing, shuddering mass. They had to be armed by hand. No remote. No safety. This was the end.

The glider shook like a dying bird as Robin forced it deeper into the wound. Alarms screamed. Hydraulic fluid sprayed across Jax's legs, hissing on the floor. The air reeked of burning circuits, of meat sizzling on invisible fires.

"Rob!" Jax's voice cracked, high with panic. His face was pale, slick with sweat. "We can still pull out! We can still-"

Robin's knuckles whitened. His whole body screamed yes, live, turn back, but he knew the truth. If they pulled out, the bombs would never detonate. The bee would recover. Humanity would vanish. Anna. Ellie. Sam. All of them would be swallowed.

"No." His voice broke. "We finish this."

Jax sobbed, slamming a fist against the glass as the bee's body spasmed, grinding walls of wet muscle around them. "I don't want to die in here, Rob! Not in this!"

The glider lurched, one wing torn away by a spasm of living tissue. Metal shrieked. Robin lost control, the craft spiraling, smashing into the convulsing walls. Sparks burst inside the cockpit. His head snapped forward, blood running into his eyes.

Through the haze, he saw Jax clutching the detonator, hands trembling. The boy looked at him, wide-eyed, terrified.

"Tell me it means something," Jax begged. "Please. Tell me this isn't just-!"

Robin swallowed hard. His mind filled with Ellie's teddy bear, with Sam's tiny hand gripping his finger, with Anna's voice whispering I love you before he shipped out.

"It means everything," he whispered. "They'll live, Jax. That's enough."

The bees' roar rose around them, a hurricane of sound that shook their bones. Its body convulsed again, slamming the glider against the wound's walls. The hull crumpled, crushing Jax's legs. He screamed, and the sound broke something in Robin.

"Now!" Robin shouted, choking on smoke. "Do it now!"

Jax fumbled, tears streaking his face. For a heartbeat, he hesitated-until Robin reached across, grabbed his hand, and steadied it. Their fingers pressed together on the trigger.

"Together," Robin said.

They pushed.

The world became light.

There was no time for pain, no time for fear. Just a blinding flash that erased everything—the cockpit, the bees' flesh, their bodies, their screams.

And then silence.

In their last instant, Robin's mind didn't see the bee, or the fire, or even Jax's broken body. It saw Anna's smile. Ellie's teddy bear. Sam's little voice saying, Daddy, stay.

And then there was nothing.

Chapter Text

When the fighting ended, there was no cheer. No celebration, no victory parades, no music. Just the silence of a world that had survived by clawing itself bloody. The bee was gone, but the holes it had torn through lives remained wide, gaping, unfilled.

Robin wasn't among those who returned. His name was stamped into a report, filed under "Presumed KIA." Anna received a folded flag and a hollow speech about courage. His daughter didn't understand why her father's face was now just a photograph in a frame.

Cities mourned in silence. Whole regions were uninhabitable, poisoned by gas and fire. The air smelled of chemicals and smoke for months. They had won, yes, but the price was stitched into every grave, every burned-out field, every child who asked when their father was coming home.

Jax's name... Jax's name broke something deeper. He had no wife, no children. Just his mother, who had built her whole life around her only son. When the letter arrived, she didn't scream. She didn't cry. She sat very still in her chair, the paper trembling in her hands. The neighbors said she stayed that way for hours, as though movement would make it more real.

At the memorial wall, she stood alone. No family gathered around her, no children to hold her hand. Just one woman staring at one name, as if her whole world had been boiled down to four letters cut into stone. At the memorial wall, the crowd was endless. Some stood stiff, uniforms crisp, jaws clenched against the tide threatening to swallow them. Others couldn't hold themselves upright at all, men and women collapsing to their knees, fingers clawing at names as though they could pull the dead back from stone.

Anna pressed her daughter's head to her shoulder and wept soundlessly, her other hand trembling over Robin's name, their infant daughter wailing. A few paces away, Jax's mother broke at last. Her knees gave out, and a wail ripped through her chest, raw, primal, the sound of a world ending twice. Soldiers turned their faces away, ashamed of their tears, but her cry carried over the field like a truth none of them could deny: the cost had been too high.

Elsewhere, a man pounded his fists against the wall until his knuckles split, smearing blood over the name of the wife he'd never see again. Another woman cradled a small pair of shoes in her lap, rocking back and forth in the dust, her eyes vacant. A boy, no older than twenty, whispered apologies over and over to the lover he hadn't been brave enough to propose to before the draft took them both.

The wall stretched on for miles. For each name etched into it, there was a story left shattered. Families undone. Lovers parted. Futures burned away. Names stretched farther than the horizon, each one cutting into someone's heart.

Ashton's father stood stiff as a statue at first, his soldier's training keeping his back straight, his jaw locked. But when his eyes finally landed on his son's name, the discipline crumbled. His hand shook violently as he traced the letters, and he muttered, "That was supposed to be me. Not you. Never you." His wife tried to hold him, but he pushed her back, not out of anger, but because the weight of his guilt was too great to be shared. In the end, he fell to his knees, his sobs breaking the silence that the others had held. A general had lost his son, and in that moment, rank meant nothing. He was just a father with empty arms and a dead son.

Ben's family had gathered together: his sister clutching their mother's hand, their grandmother too frail to stand without support. They had all dressed in black, though their faces looked pale and hollow, as if the color had been drained from them along with Ben's life. His mother carried a folded flag in her arms, the one he had draped over his bunk as a boy because he said it made him feel brave. Now it was all she had left. She pressed her face into the fabric and sobbed quietly, whispering his childhood nickname, the one only she had ever used.

His sister, too young to know how to grieve properly, lashed out instead. She shouted at the wall, cursing the war, the monster, the generals who had sent her brother out to die. Soldiers nearby turned their heads, shame coloring their faces, because they knew she wasn't wrong. Her anger rang like a bell in the silence, echoing louder than any prayer.

Together, Ashton's father and Ben's family stood among thousands, their grief woven into the greater tide. Each story is unique, but all are bound by the same cruel truth: the monster had been slain, but it had taken too much with it.

And in the aftermath, there was no victory. Only survival. The rebuild came because it had to. Cities clawed their way back from ruin, and children grew up learning how to live in a world where the sky was no longer trusted. Anna tried to smile for her daughter's sake. Jax's mother kept her shutters drawn.

But every so often, at night, both women would wake to the same phantom sound, a low, droning hum, carried by the wind. And in that moment, they remembered what the world had taken from them. A husband. A father. A son. And beyond each family, a hundred others. A thousand. A nation on its knees.

At dinner tables, chairs went empty. At birthdays, candles were lit for children who would never grow older. At weddings, the missing were toasted with bitter laughter and hollow glasses. In schools, teachers stumbled over roll calls, choking on names no longer there.

It was not one loss. It was not a hundred. It was an entire generation, swallowed whole. The bee had fallen, yes. But it had taken fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers, sons, and daughters. It had carved holes in the fabric of humanity so wide they would never mend.

And the cruelest truth whispered in quiet corners, the truth no leader dared to say aloud: this had been only one. One beast, one battle. Humanity had survived, but just barely, and survival felt like nothing more than another form of loss.

At night, in the silence after mourning, people would wake with hearts racing, ears straining. They thought they heard it: that low, unearthly hum. Not in the air, not in the earth, but in their bones.

And every time, the grief sharpened into terror.

The bee was gone. Not killed, not slain in some clean duel of man versus monster. Gone the way a storm is gone, burned out, spent, leaving wreckage in its wake. Its carcass had fallen into the sea, black ichor fouling the waves, a continent's worth of coastline poisoned. For days, the ocean boiled with its decay, like the Earth itself was trying to purge the infection.

Its blood seeped into the soil in thick, tar-like rivers. At first, it only killed what lay closest: the grass beneath its wings, the trees splintered beneath its bulk. But rain carried the poison further, deeper, into aquifers and streams. Vineyards rotted on the vine, cornfields yellowed into dust, orchards dropped fruit that blackened overnight. Farmers spoke of the earth "forgetting how to live."

The oceans fared no better. Carried by storms, fragments of the bee's exoskeleton washed out to sea. Within weeks, fisheries collapsed. Coral reefs dissolved into bone-white rubble, and great shoals of fish washed ashore, their eyes filmed with a milky sheen. Whales breached and died in the shallows, their lungs scalded by unseen toxins. Seabirds circled, starved, and fell into the waves.

And with the collapse of nature came the collapse of man.

Pollination faltered, first in whispers and then in screams. Entire species of bees, butterflies, and birds that had once carried life from flower to flower began to vanish. Wheat yields have halved. Rice paddies turned stagnant. Cities found themselves tightening belts, rationing bread, and watching shelves empty. Governments tried everything: artificial pollinators, lab-grown crops, and seed vaults cracked open far too soon. But for every small success, ten more disasters bloomed.

And still the carcass lay there. Too massive to move, too dangerous to touch. Burning it only unleashed storms of choking fumes. Cutting it apart poisoned entire battalions. Leaving it alone was worse. Its bulk decayed into a continent-sized tomb, seething with toxins, leaking venom into the ground. The air for miles around shimmered with invisible particulates that scalded lungs and stripped paint from metal.

Nations ringed the impact zone with fences and checkpoints, but still the wind carried its curse. Whole towns developed what doctors called "bee-lung," a rasping cough that ate the body from within. Children were the first to die. Then the elderly. Then the healthy. The maps redrew themselves not with new borders, but with dead zones; places marked not by conquest, but by contamination.

Years passed, and where once there had been rolling farmland and golden vineyards, there was only blackened wasteland. The Earth had not healed. It had been scarred.

Humanity told itself it had won. They spoke of the day the monster fell, of soldiers who had given their lives to strike it down. But victory songs rang hollow when food could not be grown, when fish no longer swam, when mothers buried children whose lungs had rotted from breathing poisoned air.

Chapter Text

Maya pressed her face to the cracked windowpane, staring at the horizon. The sky was bruised purple with the last of sunset, but there was something moving in that dim light, a shifting, writhing shadow that didn't belong.

She could hear it before she saw it: a low, vibrating hum, like the heartbeat of the earth had gone wrong. The sound made her stomach twist, and she clutched the edge of the windowsill so hard her knuckles turned white.

Her father had gone out for supplies hours ago. Her mother had already locked the doors and windows, whispering prayers under her breath that didn't reach far enough. Maya could see the trees in the distance shaking, and the shadows between them flickered unnaturally.

A small cluster emerged first, moving in perfect formation. Then another. And another. The buzzing grew louder, more insistent, filling the air like a living thing. The hairs on Maya's arms stood on end. She pressed her hand to her mother's shoulder.

"Mom... it's... they're coming."

Her mother's lips parted, but no words came. She only pulled Maya closer as the first dark swarm dipped toward the village, glinting in the fading light, wings humming like knives in the air.

Maya's breath caught. Somewhere deep inside, she understood: the bees weren't finished. They were only learning, only preparing, and soon, they would be everywhere.

Outside, the horizon seemed to shift and pulse with black motion, a silent promise that humanity's nightmare had only begun.

And then the wind carried that droning, alien buzzing straight to their ears.

Far beyond Maya's village, across the oceans and continents scarred by the first battle, the world seemed deceptively calm. Cities rebuilt, crops replanted, seas restocked; humanity breathed, thinking the nightmare had ended.

But it hadn't.

In the Amazon, a canopy of trees shivered, unnaturally synchronized. Workers in a remote research station froze as a low, vibrating hum rolled over the forest. Birds scattered, insects fled, and from the depths of the jungle, dark shapes lifted into the sky, thousands of small, precise forms moving in impossible coordination.

On the plains of Africa, a herd of wildebeest bolted, snorting in terror, as a black storm of wings descended, blotting out the sun. Farmers stumbled from their homes, shields raised, only to watch swarms twist and spiral in a maddening, deliberate dance.

In the North Atlantic, naval stations detected anomalous signals. Radar blips moved too fast, too fluidly, shapes unrecognizable by any standard. The remnants of the original fleet scrambled jets, but the hum was everywhere now, not just above water, it followed currents, rode winds, and traced shadows along the coastlines.

And in the Arctic, where humanity had thought no life could thrive, something massive shifted beneath the ice. A faint vibration, a murmur from below, hinted at a hidden hive, growing, calculating, waiting.

Everywhere, humans whispered the same word in fear: They're back.

The droning rose again, louder, everywhere at once. It was no longer one bee, no longer a single swarm. It was a chorus of black, metallic hums, a global heartbeat that made the world itself shiver.

Somewhere, a single thought pulsed through every hive mind: We are learning. We are multiplying. And we are coming.

And then the skies went dark.