Brivaria fought with confidence against the aether wasps because it wasn’t her first time doing so. Three times she was called upon to fight the deadly creatures and three times she’d done her best to cull them. It felt like eons ago that a level 101 Brivaria answered the call of an old man in the vestments of some religious order. She was ready to bring the light of heaven and its fury to whatever foes were menacing the old man and his fellows. She had been a different person then with a far different skill set.

  The first time she was summoned was before the man she would come to know as High Priest Verticus. He was a wizened fellow sans a System-granted blessing to stem the march of time. The years had stolen the color from his hair and etched lines of fear and concern into his face that he would wear for the rest of his life. Verticus and the people he was with were survivors of a disaster at sea that saw their ship badly damaged and swept violently off-course at sea. They ran aground in a foreign land and were attempting to find civilization.

  The foreign jungle proved to be the nesting grounds of dozens of aether wasp hives. Father Verticus and his people provoked the swarm by accident and were swiftly marked as their enemies. The jungle came to life with the intention to slay his people. Brivaria wasn’t certain what the old priest sacrificed to call upon her aid but each time she saw him, his grasp on life seemed far weaker than the last. Also each time she saw him, he bade her to help them. She honored his wishes and met the wasps in battle with holy vigor to protect his people.

  The aether wasps were vulnerable to wind magic as they used natural flight with seemingly no system-assisted skills. The first time she’d been summoned, the sky had been full of the flying insects and she had drained it with a mighty whirlwind. Thousands of wasps were sucked into a vortex and pulled toward a funnel of killing light. In a feat of tremendous personal and magical might, she brought down the entire swarm.

  The second time she was summoned was weeks after the first. The aftermath had been unkind to the shipwrecked survivors for the hordes were replenished by what they later learned were the nest keepers—living creatures that were mobile hives. They were the wasp’s comb come to life. Not only could they produce a near limitless supply of both the flying wasps and ground wasps but they also followed the beleaguered survivors. It was in her second summoning that the angel struck a blow against the nest keepers. A young geomancer had been guarded fiercely by the clergy and it was her magic that split the very earth to reveal the nest keepers. Brivaria rained down spears of divine judgment upon the enormous, living hives.

  The third summons was her last. It was in that final intervention that she learned the truth about the aether wasps. They were not wholly mindless killing machines rather they were guided by an intelligence. Behind each set of hives was a queen wasp that resembled her flying kin but many times larger. However these were not the only creatures compelling the insects to do battle; rather there was even a power behind the queens—an aether wasp empress. It was the queens and empress who were Brivaria’s opponents in this last intervention.

  The final battle was swift and brutal. The angel was not given a long time limit to carry out her duties on Zlithia. Sometimes it could be made longer if the summoner was up to the task but Father Verticus had grown weaker with each manifestation and she appeared as they were already locked in a losing battle with the wasps. Brivaria’s entrance changed everything. She healed the wounded and beat back the queens. Shield raised, sword alight with divine power, and a golden halo rekindling hope in the hopeless, she was all that stood between the survivors and their doom.

  The queens were fast and deadly with a dozen corrosive tendrils to the mere two the drones sported yet each that charged the angel paid for it with their life. Brivaria’s glowing sword cut them in two as easily as it did the drones. It was the empress that gave the angel trouble for she was closer to a Celian than the still insect-like queens. Standing on two legs, she possessed four arms and an abdomen with a deadly stinger. She fought with System-granted skills, chitinous swords, four corrosive tendrils, and, of course, her poisonous stinger.

  The empress’ fervor for battle was impressive but it was nothing compared to an angel whose entire existence was for the purpose of warfare and battle. Brivaria hacked her opponent down with righteous fury. The wasp leader had been the one who pursued these poor people even as they fled. She’d persisted in this terrible one-sided war. She’d driven both her own kind and the humans toward mutual annihilation. It was only as she beheld the avenging angel that her folly was realized.

  Father Verticus collapsed during the battle but he held onto life long enough to see Brivaria triumph over the thing that had haunted his people and stolen away their loved ones in a senseless war. Even as Brivaria faded from the world, she gave the blessings of heaven to those people trapped in a hostile, foreign land. She had not saved them but she had given them a chance at life. She had fulfilled her purpose as an angel.

  Now walking past the many dead wasps on the floor of the keep, Brivaria’s mind was called back to her brief time in that strange jungle. She never found out what happened to Father Verticus’ people. She hoped they were still alive, somewhere, and that her deeds had given them a brighter future. The winged girl also thanked them for the knowledge she’d gained so long ago was helping even now.

  Brivaria, Dax, Giselle, and Trixie moved through the corridor slaying any insects they encountered. The angel knew there would be a queen directing the nest keepers but she also knew the queens were not prone to this sort of attack. In the past, it had been the empress who had driven the wasps to war and given them strategic commands where the queens merely defended their territory. That was how Brivaria knew there was someone behind the wasps. Trapping the most influential people in Velk in a room to murder them was not the act of a simple insect hive defending its territory.

  “What the hell is taking so long?” a man’s voice echoed down the corridor. The tone was shrill, angry, and spoke to a man losing his patience. Brivaria willed the illumination from her wings and claws to dim as they crept closer. The wasps lacked a true hive mind so the greater swarm had not been alerted to their intrusion nor the destruction of the envelope barring the passage behind them. Dax took point as he likely had the highest attributes among them and at very least knew how to walk quietly regardless of what skills he possessed.

  Inside the next room was a mass of wasps. They covered the walls, the ceiling, and skittered about the floor. Most of them followed the extra large aether wasp queen who stood on her six legs in the center of the room. She was an enormous wasp, easily twice the size of a horse, and just barely small enough to fit through the castle corridors. Many little ground wasps trailed behind her, clicking their mandibles. It was not the queen that drew the eyes of the group but rather the human man that was riding on her back.

  “Just how long does it take to flood a single room and kill a bunch of idiot nobles and unarmed adventurers. They should be dead already. Something has gone wrong. Something has to have gone wrong. Gods above, I should leave now before the guards break through the barriers.” The man kept muttering to himself as the group listened. While only Dax could see him, Brivaria could feel his anxiety and hear his fraying nerves in every word.

  He was right to be worried, the winged girl thought with a toothy grin. She and Kseniya had ruined his plan. While her Luminous Desecration and Kseniya’s poisonous miasma couldn’t kill the swarm at their current level, they could force a stalemate so long as their mana lasted. Speaking of which, the angel looked to the screen given to her team by Giselle’s Heart of the Herd skill. Brivaria could see Kseniya’s mana. It was down to one third. The sorceress was surely responsible for thousands if not tens of thousands of dead wasps at this point but Kseniya did not have an endless amount of mana. Luminous Desecration also had a timer of its own. While Brivaria didn’t need to spend mana to keep it going, it had a fixed duration that would eventually run out and she wasn’t there to recast it.

  Of course, neither of those would be a problem if they put an end to the madman’s plans here and now. The man continued giving voice to his fears and worries while Dax turned around to look at them. Brivaria wore the same fanged smile she’d held while killing the previous wasp swarm and her black tail swished through the air behind her. Giselle was at full health and nearly full mana but the hands that held her mace trembled. This would be her first true battle and she was holding it together quite well, Brivaria thought. The angel-turned-demon reached out to put a supportive hand on Giselle’s shoulder. The sharpened claws were likely not as reassuring as the winged girl would have liked but between that gesture and Trixie rubbing up against Giselle, the deer girl calmed. The golden sunchaser was easily the most serene out of the four. Her tail wagged and she danced in place, full of energy.

  The man’s rambling came to an abrupt end. Dax turned just in time to see the queen wasp turn her head in their direction followed by the man riding her. For a single, awkward moment the two sides of the coming conflict merely stared at one another. That came to an abrupt end and each exploded into action a second later but Dax was the fastest. The warrior used a burst of stamina to charge into the room, swords drawn with the intent to put the man and his mount down swiftly.

  “Who are you? Guards shouldn’t be here. You look like… gah!” the man shouted. In the time it took for him to ramble off those few words, Dax had crossed the room and leaped forward. Direct assaults were the easiest to counter and no one was too surprised when Dax was swatted out of the air by one of the queen wasp’s large legs. It had been a worthy gamble. Cordelia Westlake’s bodyguard flew toward the opposite wall of the round room, arrested his momentum with one leg upon impact, and bounced off while cutting apart three small wasps nearby. For all the world it looked as though he’d intended every part of that.

  Giselle and Brivaria were not standing idle. While Dax had beaten the girls to the queen, Giselle had been right behind him. Where he’d gotten batted away immediately she brought her mace down on the queen’s head with a satisfying crunch. The insect recoiled back, shaking its head as its health restored its smashed face.

  “Strike,” the wasp’s rider commanded and a black leg shot out far faster than the one that had struck Dax. It hit Giselle squarely in the chest and sent the girl hurtling backward.

  Brivaria saw the strike and Giselle’s health display go down in the System-granted screen. The winged girl was hurling Bolts of Decay at both the rider and the giant wasp. The man was disheveled and unimpressive, sporting mud-caked trousers, a tattered and stained shirt with a hole under one arm, and a tangled mess of black locks that looked as though it had been months without attention. He looked more like a down-on-his-luck field hand than a villainous mastermind but Brivaria had seen the flash of a skill when he’d commanded the wasp. He was a tamer class of some sort and a high enough level to command the queen.

  “Kill them!” he shouted frantically as the bolts hit and Dax began his second attack. Dozens of wasps all around the room and its ceiling immediately took to the air and dove at the adventurers. Brivaria’s Bleak Radiance slowed the airborne tide of death but no one had a means to stop them. In the old days, her angelic abilities had come with a multitude of wide area attack spells and skills. She was good in fights like these. Now she could activate Bleak Radiance and Luminous Desecration but that was where her crowd control abilities ended. As it was she couldn’t activate Luminous Desecration a second time without ending the one protecting the nobles. The winged girl realized they would be surrounded and stung to death in moments if they stayed. The group had to run. They had to get somewhere they could deal with this swarm. They had to… bark.

  The loud explosion of sound kicked its way in through one ear and punched the winged girl’s brain hard enough to knock what she was thinking straight out the other ear. She staggered under its effect and she wasn’t even the one being targeted. Her ears rang for the brief second it took the System to repair her hearing with a few points of health.

  If Brivaria had it bad, everyone else in the room had it worse. Wasps lost control and crashed into walls, one another, and the floor. Some outright died mid-air and just fell to the ground. Those that didn’t enter a quasi-catatonic state ambled around drunkenly, bumping into one another. The queen wasp was rubbing its head against the floor of the room while the man cursed up a storm that Brivaria only heard the latter end of.

  “…was that!?” the man cried in alarm, the first part of his question lost before Brivaria’s hearing returned. As one, everyone in the room looked at Trixie. The golden sunchaser’s pink tongue lolled out of her mouth and her tail wagged happily. She gave another bark and everyone visibly winced, expecting a second sonic attack. When none came, the fighting resumed. Brivaria had just enough time to notice that Trixie’s mana, and she did have mana, had gone down. The dog had used another skill and it had been a big one.

  Without the swarm, the battle became easier but not easy. The wasp rider could summon more wasps. Brivaria wasn’t certain if he was pulling them from somewhere else with his skill or conjuring them out of thin air but suddenly 10 of the things appeared in front of Giselle, forcing her to spend time clubbing them out of the air with her mace.

  Once it became clear the group wasn’t going down without a significant fight, the wasp queen started using all of her weapons. The queen’s deadly mandibles along with the four corrosive tendrils the queen sported were mixed into her attacks. Brivaria caught a solid blow against her chest from the latter and immediately felt her armor disintegrating beneath the corrosive slime. It had already needed repairs before this and would need a great deal more after. The queen’s stinger was thankfully the easiest thing to avoid. If they’d been outside then the story might have been different but unless the giant wasp could pin someone down then no one would have to fear the deadly appendage.

  Slowly, the fight tilted in their favor. Giselle broke one of the queen’s legs by slamming the head of her mace into the black appendage when it swiped at her. Dax managed to put a dagger in the rider’s stomach and it was removed swiftly but the damage had been done. Brivaria was unable to get in range to claw the man but her tail had sliced off two of the queen’s four tendrils. The deadly tentacles now lay on the ground while ichor dripped from the wounds.

  The fight was over. Brivaria could see it, Dax could see it, and the wasp rider could see it. There was no way the fight continuing led to anything but the man’s death. That’s what made his stubborn insistence on prolonging the battle so confusing. Sometimes fanatics would fight to the death and monsters definitely would but their opponent did not strike Brivaria as either. He was terrified but still lucid and definitely in his right mind. At least, it was as right as it could be for a man killing a bunch of innocent people by commanding swarms of monster wasps.

  She was swooping down with her claws extended, ready to end the battle, when there was movement to her left. Her low awareness gave her no time to react and pain blossomed in her side. One moment she was descending upon her enemy and the next she was looking at the chamber wall rushing toward her and promising a bone-breaking impact.