Reincarnated To Evolve My Bee Empire-Chapter 406: This is it - enough!

Several hours of agitated discussions, reading and waving around the latest notes on movement of our troops, and moving wooden pieces over a paper map of the continent, I had to admit the truth.

"We... don’t have the resources."

We just hadn’t!

The bulk of our armies was busy guarding the ever-growing borders of the Bee Empire and the fields of the Naregan Kingdom. A lot of people were strengthening my rule in the Eastern Expanse Reach and preparing to meet the Vardish Empire.

A lot of other soldiers were assisting our humanitarian effort in the four suffering kingdoms—they were guarding my Agents, ambassadors and their food.

And of course, there was an army sent to threaten the Judji Republic...

But Warriors wouldn’t be able to find someone as stealthy as the metal eaters. I needed Commando Bees, who could stalk them out, and they were always busy somewhere, usually outside the Empire.

At the moment, a lot were scoping out Hatha and Judji countries for a potential future war.

Compared to the Warriors, there were very few Commandos in the first place—around one Commando to a hundred Warriors. Which meant thousands of thousands, because of the amount of Warriors that was now countable in millions.

I slammed my palm on the table in frustration.

"Dammit! This amount of Commando Bees was always more than enough to scope out anything we wanted to scope out. But it won’t be enough to search all the places where the metal-eaters might hide now or in the future!"

With these words I gestured at another map sketched to me by Undecided. It was rough and small compared to the main map, and also covered in hundreds of dots.

Each coal dot represented an incident that could be caused by metal-eaters and would happen within the next week. The darker dots meant that the event was going (if it would, of course) happen sooner. The paler the dot was, the more time we had until something happened there.

There was a clear pattern. The dark dots began at the edges of the Bee Empire and in other countries where my influence reached. The paler dots went deeper and deeper into the Empire.

Although the dots were so numerous they made the map look gray, Undecided had warned me already that those were rushed and very imprecise prophecies. Many of these dots could mean honest accidents, not related to metal-eaters at all. Many accidents caused by metal-eaters weren’t prophesied yet.

"They are stealthy enough to be able to sneak past all our border patrols and all the workers and other bees inside the Bee Empire," I said to the Council. "This is just terrible! If we don’t stop them, they are going to sabotage even our mechas, and I don’t need a prediction to know it."

My Advisers listened with glum faces. Nothing that I said was new *or* fun.

"There are some Commando Bees that can be recalled from less-critical duties in other places, Father. They won’t be enough to cover all the events, but... The worst of them, at least," Bloodhero said, then clenched her jaw. "We only need one lucky encounter to at least find out what we fight against!"

In the end, nobody had a better idea. I gave orders to train more Commandos in the future and send the available ones to the places where sabotage could bring the most harm.

After this, I could only wait and hope that nothing too terrible happened until Barahi and Kachi-Chi Kingdoms were fully stabilized and I could focus on the other two.

***

Of course I jinxed myself. On the next day after that, I got grim news—the Vardish Empire fleet had finally approached our shores.

It was still far away—the Oracles in Eastern had just predicted that it might appear within a week. This time—unlike a few other times when the arsonist squads went to the sea—the probability was approaching 100%.

To balance out this piece of news, I was told that the Naregan people have built their first manufactory of canned food in a harbor city using schematics and instructions given to them by bees.

It was a simplistic manufactory compared to the ones that bees had, but it could preserve fish caught by fishermen in the sea. With this experience, humans were already preparing to build more manufactures, and also share the knowledge of them with the people of Judji.

The Hatha Kingdom was still starving, but I had to place priorities.

***

Five days later, mass attacks of evolved chickens and ducks began in Judji, Hatha and Kachi-Chi. The reports followed one by one—the attacks barely had a pause between them. And these animals were ones still largely kept alive as a long-term source of eggs.

The creatures just rebelled and attacked—with too much coordination for my taste.

Of course, because the Kachi-Chi king already gave orders to exterminate the domesticated dragons beforehand, fewer of his people were attacked.

However, Hatha was on the verge of total collapse. Its king called an army to protect people from the dragons, but they escaped their pens near people and began terrorizing them in a guerrilla war.

The rule of the king was breaking. More and more people turned to banditry, cannibalism and risking their lives to hunt incredibly dangerous and vicious chicken-dragons.

The Judji Republic was at least not starving. But the senate was too busy fighting each other to send the army to fight dragons.

The only good news was that the metal-eaters didn’t sabotage the Empire yet. The bad news was that the Commandos didn’t find any of them, either.

***

"This is it. Our army is in position, the target is distracted by our common enemy and we can’t wait anymore," I said to Bloodhero and Whisper (through Listener) on the sixth day. "Give the Judji senate the last chance to *quickly* agree to become our protectorate. Conquer them if they refuse. We need their fish, and we need them to obey!"

New novel 𝓬hapters are published on (f)re𝒆web(n)ovel.com