The Dragon Hornet colony had produced multiple queens, and the survivors were pulling those queens — fat, heavy, critical — out through the smoking wreckage toward the colony's perimeter.

They ran into Shen Cong.

Forty-meter leaps, speed that exceeded anything they could outpace. No escape routes opened.

The engagement ran for one hour. Shen Cong personally killed ten Dragon Hornet queens. The combined efforts of everyone else accounted for four more. Fourteen queens dead.

Without queens, the colony's coherence collapsed into something that could only be called frenzy. The remaining workers didn't flee — they flew in circles, driving themselves into the smoke, searching for whatever had killed their queens. Several broke through and found targets. Three jin person soldiers went down from stinger hits, Activity drain lethal and nearly instantaneous.

More Dragon Hornets died than soldiers, by orders of magnitude. Many of the carcasses had been caught by the fires and were charring where they lay, giving off a distinctive smell of roasted insect that was oddly not unpleasant.

"Hey, everybody — there's an intact queen chamber over here!" A soldier combing for survivors called out from somewhere in the smoke.

Shen Cong was doing the same sweep. He moved toward the voice and found a massive circular hive structure suspended between burning tree branches that had somehow protected it from direct fire and flame. The chamber walls were semi-transparent — visible inside, in each individual cell, a larva moving.

Queen-type larvae. The chamber was configured for producing queens and drones, not workers. Workers had underdeveloped reproductive organs and didn't develop in these chambers. This was the colony's reproductive core: drone larvae destined for mating flights, female larvae destined to become queens. The drone's life cycle ended shortly after mating. The fertilized female became the next queen.

Shen Cong pulled out a blade and moved to open the chamber wall.

Dragon Hornets were a wasp-type mutation, not honey-producing — no honey in the hive. But the queen chamber larvae were another matter. Nutritional research value, or direct consumption, either justified taking them.

Before he could start, a gun barrel…