Several hours of agitated discussions, reading and waving around the latest notes on movent of our troops, and moving wooden pieces over a paper map of the continent, I had to admit the truth.
"We... don’t have the resources."
We just hadn’t!
The bulk of our armies was busy guarding the ever-growing borders of the Bee Empire and the fields of the Naregan Kingdom. A lot of people were strengthening my rule in the Eastern Expanse Reach and preparing to et the Vardish Empire.
A lot of other soldiers were assisting our humanitarian effort in the four suffering kingdoms—they were guarding my Agents, ambassadors and their food.
And of course, there was an army sent to threaten the Judji Republic...
But Warriors wouldn’t be able to find soone as stealthy as the tal eaters. I needed Commando Bees, who could stalk them out, and they were always busy sowhere, usually outside the Empire.
At the mont, a lot were scoping out Hatha and Judji countries for a potential future war.
Compared to the Warriors, there were very few Commandos in the first place—around one Commando to a hundred Warriors. Which ant thousands of thousands, because of the amount of Warriors that was now countable in millions.
I slamd my palm on the table in frustration.
"Dammit! This amount of Commando Bees was always more than enough to scope out anything we wanted to scope out. But it won’t be enough to search all the places where the tal-eaters might hide now or in the future!"
With these words I gestured at another map sketched to by Undecided. It was rough and small compared to the main map, and also covered in hundreds of dots.
Each coal dot represented an incident that could be caused by tal-eaters and would happen within the next week. The darker dots ant that the event was going (if it would, of course) happen sooner. The paler the dot was, the more ti we had until sothing happened there.
There was a clear pattern. The dark dots began at the edges of the Bee Empire and in other countries where my influence reached. The paler dots went deeper and deeper into the Empire.
Although the dots were so nurous they made the map look gray, Undecided had warned already that those were rushed and very imprecise prophecies. Many of these dots could an honest accidents, not related to tal-eaters at all. Many accidents caused by tal-eaters weren’t prophesied yet.
"They are stealthy enough to be able to sneak past all our border patrols and all the workers and other bees inside the Bee Empire," I said to the Council. "This is just terrible! If we don’t stop them, they are going to sabotage even our chas, and I don’t need a prediction to know it."
My Advisers listened with glum faces. Nothing that I said was new *or* fun.
"There are so Commando Bees that can be recalled from less-critical duties in other places, Father. They won’t be enough to cover all the events, but... The worst of them, at least," Bloodhero said, then clenched her jaw. "We only need one lucky encounter to at least find out what we fight against!"
In the end, nobody had a better idea. I gave orders to train more Commandos in the future and send the available ones to the places where sabotage could bring the most harm.
After this, I could only wait and hope that nothing too terrible happened until Barahi and Kachi-Chi Kingdoms were fully stabilized and I could focus on the other two.
***
Of course I jinxed myself. On the next day after that, I got grim news—the Vardish Empire fleet had finally approached our shores.
It was still far away—the Oracles in Eastern had just predicted that it might appear within a week. This ti—unlike a few other tis when the arsonist squads went to the sea—the probability was approaching 100%.
To balance out this piece of news, I was told that the Naregan people have built their first manufactory of canned food in a harbor city using schematics and instructions given to them by bees.
It was a simplistic manufactory compared to the ones that bees had, but it could preserve fish caught by fishern in the sea. With this experience, humans were already preparing to build more manufactures, and also share the knowledge of them with the people of Judji.
The Hatha Kingdom was still starving, but I had to place priorities.
***
Five days later, mass attacks of evolved chickens and ducks began in Judji, Hatha and Kachi-Chi. The reports followed one by one—the attacks barely had a pause between them. And these animals were ones still largely kept alive as a long-term source of eggs.
The creatures just rebelled and attacked—with too much coordination for my taste.
Of course, because the Kachi-Chi king already gave orders to exterminate the dosticated dragons beforehand, fewer of his people were attacked.
However, Hatha was on the verge of total collapse. Its king called an army to protect people from the dragons, but they escaped their pens near people and began terrorizing them in a guerrilla war.
The rule of the king was breaking. More and more people turned to banditry, cannibalism and risking their lives to hunt incredibly dangerous and vicious chicken-dragons.
The Judji Republic was at least not starving. But the senate was too busy fighting each other to send the army to fight dragons.
The only good news was that the tal-eaters didn’t sabotage the Empire yet. The bad news was that the Commandos didn’t find any of them, either.
***
"This is it. Our army is in position, the target is distracted by our common enemy and we can’t wait anymore," I said to Bloodhero and Whisper (through Listener) on the sixth day. "Give the Judji senate the last chance to *quickly* agree to beco our protectorate. Conquer them if they refuse. We need their fish, and we need them to obey!"
Reviews
All reviews (0)