Wasps!: Chapter 3

Ilyse swiftly followed after Imperator.

It wasn’t long before rain came down upon them, slowly and minimally at first, refreshing and nice, and Ilyse let out a small hoot of satisfaction, but after a while, it started pouring and wasps screeched as they were hit by the droplets, falling to the ground as their wings were too heavy now to fly.

Some were still determined as ever to keep attacking though.

“How many of these things are there, what the heck?!” Sharona exclaimed over the sound of the heavy rain.

His Stryx tried to remain aloft and his claws clashed with the bugs that dared stray closer to him, he batted them away with his wings and fought his way as he continued to follow the Lycan.

It took a moment for Sharona and Ilyse to remember Ilyse did, in fact, have a special breath, after he knocked over a wasp as he flew right through it and ravaged its insides with only his beak as his weapon.

He and his handler looked at each other and without a word, Ilyse took a deep breath, and released it, lightning piercing through the wasps in the vicinity, savagely, tearing them all apart.
Ilyse let out a screech of victory.

The flight became silent from there.

This worried Sharona.

“Am I right in thinking there’s gonna be more of these bugs the closer we get to the nest?” He asked Adusta.

*

“Surprisingly, no,” the feravo replied. “In this weather, most of them would be finding a place to hide and dry off. We’ve got a narrow window of…” she stared up into the clouds, then hissed and threw her paw over her eyes as a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, “one hour max to get in, kill the queen, get out. Ow.”

The boom of thunder that followed sent a shockwave rippling out at them. Imperator pumped his wings to stabilise himself, then sighed and hovered still, waiting for Adusta to blink the black spots out of her eyes.

“Y’all uh… go on ahead. Ow, oh that burns-- ow, flashes…”
 

*

Sharona became somewhat worried for Adusta.

“Okay but we will keep close. Just in case.”

Ilyse flew up in front of Imperator and scouted ahead while staying close to the Lycan. Thankfully the attacks had ceased because of the rain, but one could never be too careful.Especially as lightning kept streaking the sky, the thunder booming around them in a distinct rythm.

Ilyse turned to the right, and then their flight was straight from there. He could already see the den from his position, his feathers fluffing as he prepared himself to strike when the moment came. A few wasps were standing there, free from the rain and waiting for them.

The Tyto flapped his wings harder and squinted at the creatures who hissed, and he hissed in return.

“Adusta do you want to rest before we charge on in?” Sharona asked. “Either way when we do we’ll have to clear a path, and then you can do the same before we finally enter the den, alright?”

*

Adusta flapped her left paw at them. “Nah, nah, pardner, ain’t about to let a little light stop me…”

Meanwhile, Imperator had turned his head around and plucked her spear out of its holder. With some impressive gum and tongue work, he maneuvered it until it was pointed forwards, like a dinky narwhal horn. He tossed his head at Ilyse, and without waiting for a reaction, he shot forward, heading for the top part of the nest that wasn’t patrolled by wasps. He tucked in his wings at the last second, forming a missile that smashed a new hole through the nest’s paper-like walls.

The two of them tumbled into a hexagonal hell of cells and brooding larvae. A few resident wasps stared at them, but without the queen’s pheromones to guide them, they were quickly dispatched with a few precise stabs.

“Right,” Adusta whispered, finally daring to take her paw off her eyes, “not the entrance I woulda wanted, but we can work with this. Sharona, how boutcha stab these queen cells, end the bloodline? Imp’ll smoke out the hive, make ‘em calm and cool like, ‘til we find the queen. Then we got fifteen seconds to run after we chop her head off. Sound like a plan?”

*

Sharona nodded. “Absolutely!”

Ilyse cried out his approval as well. The Tyto flew to the remains of the hive and grabbed the cells with his talons and squished them. He pecked at others while Sharona stabbed them with a spear.
 

Ilyse let out a powerful lightning once again, the electricity liquifying the cells, killing them instantly. He then grabbed a larva with his beak, threw it into the air and gulped it down. It was a good snack, and soon, he would get to eat a whole entrée.
 

He flew behind Imperator, motionning for him to do his thing.

*

While they were at it, Adusta had pulled a pawful of generic rocks from her satchel and held them out to Imperator. He licked them up with his tongue, chewing each one with an unsettling crunch of teeth on mineral, and as he swallowed them, his idle smoke puffs became larger and more hazardous to health. He sucked in a deep breath and exhaled, and soon the corridors of the hive were clouded up in a thick black fog.

“Here,” Adusta said, handing Sharona a bandana soaked in water. She and Imperator led the way deeper into the hive, strutting past swooning wasps and dead ones.

Like with bees, the wasp queen was easy to spot: she was about one and half times larger than her brood, with a swollen abdomen and no stinger, and though she buzzed angrily at the sight of them, Imperator’s smoke screen drowned out her pheromones.

“Want to do the honours?” the feravo said, holding one of her obsidian spears out to Sharona.

*

Sharona nodded in thanks as he accepted the spear and Ilyse approached the wasp queen carefully. He dodged the limbs shooting at him gracefully. The Tyto thought to use his lightning again, but discarded the idea, the quarters were too close together and he would risk hurting his allies.

Ilyse circled the queen, looking for weak points they could exploit. The giant wasp flailed her arms to make them keep their distance, and Ilyse was quick to catch one of them. One of her servants charged at him, but was swept away by his tail.

The Stryx grabbed at her abdomen, so that she could stay still.

Sharona threw the spear into the proferred spot and the wasp queen’s cries were loud and echoed through the whole hive.

Ilyse pushed the queen so she fell hard to the ground, retrieving the spear from her body.

His human turned to Adusta. “I think you guys should do the honors.”

*

Not even the sharpest obsidian could stop the tide of insect guts that the queen had somehow been hiding inside her.

“Ew. Ew, ew, ew.”

Adusta tossed the head to and fro between her paws, up until Imperator snatched it up in his teeth and stuffed it into his saddlebag. The other wasps were starting to stir and realise what had happened, and the lycan was starting to run out of steam, literally.

“Go go GO!”

She swung herself back into the saddle, and Imperator shut his eyes and lowered his head as she tore her spear straight through the nest’s paper walls, the noon sun flooding in with a burst of light. He didn’t even think, just ran and flailed his wings as soon as his feet left solid ground. There would be time for ‘directions’ or ‘knowing where they were going’ later, right now their priority was putting as much distance between themselves and the nest as possible.

*

Ilyse surveyed the scene and nodded, before following behind Imperator, with a souvenir from this adventure in his beak as proof that they had vanquished the wasps. It was a while of flying still, until they returned to the place where it all began, Drakyn’s home.
 

*

“Alright, listen here, y’all: when the federales show up, you say ‘never heard of ‘em’, then ‘what’s a wasp?’, and finally, ‘no sir, I ain’t seen no one go up by the nes--’ hot diggedy, is that…”

Drakyn, Hunter, and Scout turned their heads skyward and squinted against the afternoon sun as two shadows swooped by overhead. The smaller one came in for a landing first, followed by the larger, and the rancher saw that it was those two hired blades she’d sent to their doo-- ahem, to complete the job, successfully.

“Good to see y’all!” she hollered up at them, waving furiously like she hadn’t just been planning her alibi. “Suppose the job’s done, then?”

Ilyse swooped down until he landed, dropping his prize down to the ground and letting Sharona slide down from his saddle.

“It was quite the adventure.” Sharona told Drakyn. “But we accomplished our mission.”

He turned to Adusta and held a hand out in front of him.. “It was nice working with you.”

Ilyse bowed to Imperator to show respect.

Imperator nodded back, ever the prideful one. Adusta pulled the head out of her saddlebag, wiped the gunk off on the lycan’s mane fur, and tossed it over to Drakyn. Hunter leapt up and caught it in his beak, and the two runners proceeded to go to town on its… contents.

“So you have. Nicely done, pardners! As promised, two heaping bags of loot.”

She tossed each rider a big burlap sack almost as large as her own head. Adusta caught hers with both paws, but it felt weirdly squishy and not-clinky.

“Err… ma’am…” She pulled the drawstring open and poked her head in. “This is cornbread.”

“Yep. Y’all won’t find better cornmeal anywhere this side of the mountains!”

“But the reward said…”

“‘Payment on success’, word fer word.”

“...I hate the boonies.”