That screech was, for a lack of a better term, realistically and virtually unnatural.
In the real world, there's no wasp that could make a screech that loud and paralytic, and in all her virtual world experience, there's never been anything so unpleasant before. Chalk on chalkboard is the most unpleasant sound Koharu can think off, and in comparison that noise is palatable.
In the back of her mind, deep in the recesses of her memories, something tells her that her short time in the Underworld may have produced a similar feat. It's the only explanation why she's not as bothered by the noise as everyone else with VRMMO experience and the insects that the queen rules.
What made things worse was the follow-up. The soldiers bore down on her, Lux, and the six other attackers, knocking them off their feet for damage and to a stun debuff. All eight lose a big chunk of their health, with Koharu losing the least because of her ALO-imported light armor being stronger than anyone's current set (but not strong enough for UR to force her to remove it when teh grace period ended) while Leafa takes the most, given she put points into attack perks and wore UR-made light armor.
As she waits for the stun effect to wear off, she hears Silica cry out, "Leafa!"
"I... I'm fine! Focus on your role!"
Yeah, but it looks like the queen has recovered from the sonic attack's delay. Whatever comes next will be unavoidable by the eight attackers, be it a physical AOE attack or a poison debuff. Gritting her teeth at her uselessness, Koharu glances in Silica's direction. The younger girl is just as tense as the raid leader, her eyes locked on the queen. The queen is twenty feet in the air, too high for Misha's claws. Whatever Silica does next, it has to be now.
As the queen's stinger takes on a red hue, Silica shouts, "Misha, Thornspike!" That's the command for the thornspike bear's powerful attack, and unlike when it was an enemy monster, it can only be used once before a lengthy recharge period. It is the same attack that nearly took out Kirito, Asuna, and Alice in the opening hours of Unital Ring, that wiped out Schulz's team the following night, and nearly shot down Mutasina and her bird a couple of nights ago.
Misha stands on his its rear legs, spreads the front paws outward, and the lightning pattern flashes and shoots the stiffened fur in the pattern out at the queen and the soldiers just a moment before the queen's stinger attack. The sprayed hornets scream in terror and fly back ten yards. The soldiers lose half their health while the queen's first health bar loses eighty percent of its content.
"Can you manage, Silica?" Sinon questions from her position in the rear.
"I'm all right!"
"Got it! Argo, continue cleaning up!"
"No sweat!"
As the stun debuff wears off and some of the attack team praises Silica, Koharu analyzes the battlefield once again. Behind her, Argo, Friscoll, Dikkus, Holgar, Needy, and the two NPC races were culling the paralyzed hornets. That will take them some time due to the sheer number of hornets. In front of her, the queen and her guard had recovered and stabilized themselves in the air.
From the previous attack, it seems the strategy of the five hornets were for the queen to remain out of range and hit the players with special attacks while the guards do the physical damage. Eliminating the guards should bring the queen within attack range. Koharu could use Sinon's musket to attack the queen, but that's a last resort. For now, they'll follow the strategy as is. Starting with Silica gaining the queen's undivided attention.
"Koharu," Lux calls from her left. "Do we attack now?"
"Yes. As long as the queen is working with her guard, we are in trouble. We need to separate them before we can fight efficiently. We'll go on Silica's signal." The light-haired swordswoman beside her is confused, but then she notices why Koharu keeps her position and eyes on the beast tamer.
"Misha, stand!" Silica had started climbing Misha's back towards the bear's shoulders. Misha is over ten feet tall when standing on its hind legs, and it seems Silica is going to take advantage of that. Combined that she's the smallest person after Yui, Koharu suspects her friend is going to close the distance between her and the queen. Watching the wasps, the queen pauses its approach, as if it reads what Silica is trying to do. The four soldiers, however, continue towards Misha.
"Lux, once we got their attention, I'm going to disable a guard with poison. If it paralyzes it, hit it with all you got!"
"Gotcha."
"Attack!"
"You're supposed to be fighting us!" Klein bellows, running up to a guard and jump-slashing its belly with his lengthened scimitar. Leafa, Lux, and Agil join him in attacking the remaining soldiers. Nearby, Silica commands Misha to move towards the queen as it opens its jaws for another sonic attack. Then Silica goes airborne, activating the single thrust skill Rapid Bite straight to its mouth. It must have been a critical hit because the first health bar is emptied. The queen's sonic attack is interrupted and she suffered a knock-back effect.
"Good work, Silica," Koharu cheers as the younger girl flips back to Misha. Turning her attention to the soldier Lux is fighting, Koharu readies the nail between her fingers. "Lux! Switch!" The light-haired girl leaps back, giving Koharu a clear lane to charge the soldier hornet and jam the nail into its belly. As expected, the hornet's receives the lobelia poison's symbol and drops to the ground.
Koharu slides across the ground and uses her momentum to turn and settle into the pre-motion for the two-hit skill Side Bite. Target locked, she strikes the belly of the guard. Koharu's imported dagger, Mördare, is the strongest weapon in a group of basic Iron and the occasional steel weapon here and there (such as Silica's dagger, a steel weapon made from ingots of Kirito's Blárkveld) and drives the hornet's health down to twenty-five percent. "Switch!"
Lux is set up for Vertical, but before she fires it off, a flash of blue light blinds her and Koharu. Stunned by the light's appearance as it passes across the dome. Whatever it did, it didn't damage anyone or sustain a debuff effect. Where did it even come from?
Her eyes dart to the queen as a hum permeates the air. The left antenna is broken, most likely shot by Sinon given the queen is well outside of anyone's attack range twenty-five feet in the air. Was that the source of the blue light. If it didn't affect the players... A greater cacophony buzzes in Koharu's ear. Just three feet away, the guard she paralyzed lifted itself off the ground, its mandible chomping the air threateningly. All around them, the worker hornets still alive pick themselves off the ground as well, their wings buzzing with vigor.
Her fear of insects rises in her veins at the sight. The light was a debuff remover for the other hornets. Swallowing her fear, Koharu leaps away from the guardian and shouts, "Attackers, stay on the guards! Cleanup teams, surround Misha!"
Koharu had two options for the battle given the information in front of her. With the forty to fifty worker hornets reinforcing the queen and the four soldiers, that put them about double their numbers. Misha's thornspike attack has already been used, so there's no way to reduce the number of hornets in one singular attack. Based on the numbers, one player will have to theoretically fight two wasps at once, if not more. Even someone with Koharu's skill, experience, and arsenal would have trouble with that.
She could order them to continue fighting, but if they do that and enough people get paralyzed, that would make retreating harder If they retreat, Chett's life is forfeit, and allowing an ally to die, NPC or player, is against Koharu's morality. And speaking of Chett, her health is now starting to drop at a steady pace.
Even since she met Kizmel the Dark Elf knight on the third floor of Aincrad, Koharu had considered NPC lives as equal to that of humans. Of course, that distinctive has been categorized as allies and enemies for players now since actual lives weren't at stake as in SAO, but for NPCs, it hasn't changed one bit. Even when she fought the fluctlights of the Dark Territory in the Underworld, it didn't make her happy to extinguish the AIs' lives, necessary as it was.
She knew she wanted to save Chett and that everyone else felt the same way. And in her heart, she knew she wasn't going to retreat, whether Chett was in danger or not. She fought literal life and death before; what's one more battle?
"Come on, Ko." The cleanup crew would arrive at Misha in ten seconds, followed by the wasps surrounding them seconds later. But they didn't need to fight them all: the queen had made her move on the chessboard and they only had to knock her off. She has two whole bars of health and a hovering at a height of twenty-five feet from the ground. They just need to bring her down. If only they had a rope or web or...
Web. She's seen a web very recently, used to capture Friscoll when he was a scout in Mutasina's army. And it was one of the Insectsite players who created it. "Needy!"
"Ma'am?"
"Bring it down!" Her knowledge English limited her choice of words, but Needy quickly understood what she was thinking.
"Silica!" Needy calls to the girl riding on the bear. "Move and have Misha squat down!" Silica picks up enough English to figure out what Needy said, reacting by hopping off Misha's shoulders.
"Misha, get down!" Misha gets down on all fours, then Needy springs into the air and lands on Misha's back. Heading to Misha's shoulder, the grasshopper squats down and shoots up in the air as if jumping off a trampoline. The brown insect soars toward the queen hornet and the queen makes an attempt to move up higher, thinking the grasshopper is coming to grab it. While Needy's arms do look like it did try to grab the queen's rear legs, the real attack comes from the grasshopper's mouth. A stringy white thread shoots out, wrapping around the stringer. Needy's descent was halted by the attachment to the queen, and at the same time, the weight of Needy stops the queen from moving further. They merely hang in place in the air, canceling each other's desire movements out.
That is until several yellow-green lines burn and rip apart the membranes of the queen's brown wings. Sinon's using her laser pistol to create holes in the wings, and at last, the hornet begins to descend.
"Koharu!" Sinon calls out, gaining the girl's attention. Nothing more is said, but the message between Sinon's blue eyes and Koharu's violet gets across.
"Finish it, as they would."
"Got it. Thank you, Sinon."
Koharu pools all her knowledge together for a perfect solution. An all-out on the queen's weak point is impossible with the chances of hitting other players with stray attacks. A small team could do so — Silica, Lisbeth, Klein, Agil, Leafa, Lux, and herself — but how? What would Kirito do? What would Jaymes do? What half-cooked, reckless idea would they perform? Her grip on Mördare tightens as that solution.
"Koharu!" Silica rushes over to Koharu's side, eyes on Mördare and on its owner. "I have an idea! I don't know if it'll work...but I want to try it with your permission!"
Seeing the formerly timid Silica take executive action brings a smile to Koharu's face. "We'll do it. Let's finish this together. Lux, Liz, Agil, Klein, and Leafa, surround where the queen will land! Everyone else, hold off the soldiers and the workers for a while longer!"
The seven players rush to where the queen is going to drop, and Silica issues out her idea. "Hold your weapon aloft with your left hand and open your equipment menu with your right! Koharu, prepare to attack with a sword skill!"
Without hesitation, the five others did as Silica ordered. Koharu wonders why they're switching hands. All of them are right-handed, so performing sword skills with the left hand reduces the precision of the attack. But that's not what Silica is going with this plan.
In the circle of weapons land Needy. He grabs the thread of web, yank on it hard, and leaps out the way before the seven-foot green body of the hornet queen crashes into the ground on its dorsal surface, a stun debuff appearing to indicate it won't move for a moment.
"Change the weapon in your left hand to your inherited weapon!" Silica didn't get the order out completely before the others realized what she was planning and acted on it. After rotating the equipment wheels and selecting the desired weapon, six iron weapons vanished in white light, replaced by beautiful high-quality weapons, all imported from ALO.
Silica's dagger Issreidr.
Leafa's longsword Lysavindr.
Klein's sword, Spirit Katana Kagutsuchi.
Agil's ax Notthjorr.
Lux's longsword Conscience.
Lisbeth's hammer, Lightning Hammer Mjölnir.
Unlike Koharu's Mördare, their weapons required a strength stat higher than they possessed back at the end of the grace period and even now as they close in on level-20. Because of that, their arms will drop automatically no matter how hard they tried to prevent it.
And on the large midsection of the queen hornet, which is her weakness, that'll be counted as six normal weapon attacks. Silica is first, roaring with a ferocious "Ryaaaaah!" as Issreidr slams on the queen's leg. Notthjorr, Conscience, Kagutsuchi, Lysavindr, and Mjölnir follow right after, breaking the thick carapace of the queen.
And Mördare, true to its name, commits regicide by stabbing itself through the breaks in the armor.
Upon the fall of the Gilnaris Queen Hornet, the soldiers and workers bursts into specks of light at once and Chett's HP stopped falling. They still had to find the Patter, so Silica, Argo, and Leafa headed into the nest through a passage found starting in the roots of the tree.
Koharu wasn't going into a hornet's nest, empty or not. As a matter of fact, she'd be afraid of bugs for the foreseeable future. She was more than fine with collecting the resources that replaced the hornets when they vanished.
"Good work out there, Koharu." Approaching her a couple feet from the opening in the roots is Sinon, Lux, and Lisbeth. The marksman hoists her musket over her shoulders and turns to the nest. "Gotta say, I don't think Jaymes or Kirito has led a battle as you have. The captain probably would have destroyed the nest. Kirito would have cheesed it somehow."
"I'm not sure what I did deserves to be complimented. I was making it up as we went along. They or Asuna would have easily gotten us through."
"We won in the end," Lux reminds her. "No one fell in battle, and we even saved Chett. I say that's a good reason to cheer your leadership.@
"Besides, as you told me, we were only going to win together." Lisbeth pats her on the shoulder with a grin. "You did what you could in giving instructions while also being open to the ideas of others. That's better than the boys in some regard."
"Especially your boyfriend." Sinon sighs harshly, eyes narrowed. "Either he takes charge completely or doesn't say anything at all. No in-between. I wish Kureha would beat his butt already. Then again, Kirito's reckless tendencies are annoying."
"Agreed. I really don't know who's worse."
"Mhm."
"...Ahaha... Well, thanks for the encouragement."
Moments later, Silica's team returns with Chett and a boatload of treasure from the nest. It's plenty to go around, but Koharu's no stranger to how loot distribution can cause fights. Between ALS, DKB/HDA, and KoB, there's been enough arguments over boss treasure to last her a lifetime. She rather not deal with that now, else they'll be in this wasp hellhole for another thirty minutes. She orders for the matter to be settled in town, and Sinon suggests the creation of wax- sealed wooden chests to store and monitor for intrusion before the loot is properly distributed. The strength-based players will carry the chests back to Ruis na Rig.
When that's taken care of, the raiders are ready to return to base. Koharu takes a last took at the dome. Afternoon sunlight filters inside from the canopy. Around the mangled roots, the reddish-purple gargamols lie undisturbed, no hornets left to feed from them. The three bunkers by the tunnel remain in place to decay naturally. The former sound of buzzing hornets is replaced by the flowing wind and rustling leaves. That's rigbt, the annoying bugs are gone for good.
"Good riddance," are the last words Koharu murmurs to herself as she makes her exit out of the dome.
