In the dark and boundless corridors of the Hive's collective mind, silence reigned for the first time in eons.
The High Queen stirred from her suspended trance within the Core Nest, her tendrils twitching like storm-wracked vines. The Hive was never quiet—always pulsing, always humming with the endless chatter of her daughters and their marshals. But now… there was a hole. A silence that throbbed louder than screams.
Queen 117, one of her eldest, a broodmother who had spanned over nine thousand reproductive cycles and carved nests across three galaxies, had gone dark.
Completely.
It had been days since the link severed—initially mistaken for interference from Bassoon's elemental distortions. But now, without warning or summons, the link surged back to life.
And the High Queen of Consumption regretted it instantly.
At first came the disorientation: sounds without time, images without frame. Sensations as fractured shards—smoke, steel, sorrow. The Hive's neural lattice tried to process what should not have been processed: human thought, divine presence, and the cold breath of death itself.
Then the memory flooded in.
She felt what Queen 117 felt. Saw what her daughter saw in those final seconds.
A man. A mortal. Eyes that had seen beyond time and returned from the dead. His presence rippled like gravity through the battlefield.
His name echoed like poison: Zion.
He did not scream. He did not threaten.
He commanded.
And then came the flash of metal—a simple weapon, a mortal's blade. Not divine. Not alchemized. Just forged steel and iron will.
Then pain.
Then silence.
And then, just before the link collapsed permanently, a single, searing emotion surged back through the Hive's vast neural web—fear.
Raw. Paralyzing. Humiliating. The kind that no queen had ever known, nor dared to imagine.
The High Queen screamed—not with her mouth, but across the Hive's psychic web. The scream rippled through every larva, every scout, every nest. Queens jolted from their chambers. The Lords Marshal froze mid-march. The drones fell into a momentary silence so deep the stars themselves seemed to hold their breath.
A mortal… beheaded one of us.
He made us feel fear.
The Hive, bred for devouring and adaptation, had now tasted something new: vulnerability.
And for the first time in a billion cycles… the war was no longer just about consumption.
It was personal