The Hive's attack

[Rose POV]

"In the Sky!!"

Someone beat me to give the alarm. I don't know if the beasts understand human language, but a lot of them turned their heads to the sky and started to roar as if they were alerting their partners.

With the battle ready to start, I acted too.

I felt as I got lighter, and the next second, my feet were no longer on the floor. The figures in front of me turned foggy, and the colors became less saturated as if they were mixed with grey. The only one that looked the same was Paws, who also had shifted into the Astral realm.

I went up at the same time that the cloud of bees came down.

The bees were a lot bigger than I expected.

This made them easier to hit, but with a larger body came their strength was significantly increased and let's be honest, seeing giant bugs gave me goosebumps. The sting was as long as my forearm, and their bodies are at least a meter long.

My role in this kind of fights was to gather intel so I can give it to either Spence or Dante. That way the information spreads fast but now my information took a longer route to reach the human side, going through Blackie who added me to his network temporarily, it wasn't dangerous, and since I'm stronger I can leave it whenever I want. From him, the information goes to Pinky, and he is the link to the humans.

This time thing didn't go as planned …

In the time I have been part of this world, I have seen three beast and only one human that can use Astral related abilities.

Jamie, Lucy, Paws, and the Alpha Snake. Spencer, Tailless, and Cai-Cai got their abilities through other means related to the system or me, so they don't count as a natural Astral user.

So seeing a bunch of vibrant yellow bees among the Hive came as a huge surprise. Paws have grown a lot since I made the pact. He is of a similar size as the bees.

Paws looked as if he was running in the air, and as soon as he noticed the bees in the Astral Realm, he dashed in their direction.

I did the same and moved faster.

Two of the bees focused on Paws and dive in with their sting pointing at him. He didn't dodge or tried to avoid them and instead kept running straight at them. I thought he was going to be hit, but in the last second as if he jumped from an invisible platform, he turned hazy and lost his colors. He shifted into the real world and avoided the attack reappearing behind the bees before falling.

His claws draw an arc, and one of the bees already appeared to be disintegrating as if it was made of dust.

In my right hand, only a dagger could be seen. It was made from the Alpha Snake tooth, and it was the only material that until now, we have managed to affect the Astral Realm as if it was the material world.

I have to thank my brother. It was his idea to look for the body and make a weapon in case I needed to defend myself in the Astral Realm. We couldn't find the main body since I kind of throw it into the Astral Realm, but we found the remains of the one that poisoned Spence a while ago…

I used tailless ability and blinked behind the bees.

It didn't take long for us to deal with the remaining bees, with Paws ability to shift planes instantly and my blink the bees couldn't even touch us.

I didn't notice at first, but the dust that came from the dissipating bees gathered together into a single sparkling yellow particle that floated as a firefly in the middle of the air.

After a few seconds, the particle dashed in my direction, and before I could react, it was absorbed into my ring.

I was shocked and looked into the ring that had a slight glow for a moment before fading away and leaving behind the silver ring.

I focused on the ring, and I couldn't feel anything coming from it.

Nothing changed…

It took me a moment to process what just happened and come back to my senses.

Because of the little fight and the weird thing happening with my ring, I couldn't do my usual job. The battle in the earth level already started and flashes of lighting, gunshots could be seen and heard.

On the sky, there were no remaining beasts, and not a single enemy beast could be seen coming.

As much as I wanted to understand what the ring did, I couldn't do it now.

On the floor level, I noticed that Hayley was trying to keep her contribution to the minimum. Her damage output and control over the hive was low, but Blake presence somewhat compensated for it.

Sophie's was going all out. A shot after another could be heard as the bees fell one by one. Some were frozen other were twitching as purple lighting surrounded.

Spencer was right, she had a lot of potential.

Unfortunately, despite their effort, the number of bees was too high for them to control them all. The flying was annoying, and not all the beast had a mid or long-range attack.

The hive acted diving in groups against single targets.

They lose some on each dive but must of the time the objective beast was hit.

In the beginning, they were targeting the biggest beast on our side, but they shifted their target to the medium-sized as long as they were strong.

The humans started to work in groups to kill the ones that dived in the same target. Sophie and Hayley were working together on the ones that continually tried to get Blackie. Despite being hit a couple of times his wool was thick enough to prevent the sting from reaching his body

A group of bees got ready to attack again this time in Blake's direction. He noticed them despite the chaos of the battle, the same as his group.

Bullets took down three of them, but this was not enough for them to stop their attack. Six stings got nearer, Blake's face was calm and without a sign of fear.

He moved to the side and ducked to slightly avoid the first sting. As if it was what he was waiting for his left arm appeared from below and hit the bee. A flash of light and a burnt smell came as the bee was instantly charred to death. The lighting didn't just kill that bee.

The power from it was enough for it to jump to the bee that was next in line to hit Blake. And from that one, the arc lighting kept jumping from one to another annihilating the group before they could hit Blake.

Not a lot of people know the strength of Blake's attack, and in just one hit, he managed to kill various bees.

While I oversaw the situation, I tried to identify the biggest threats on the bee's side, but after looking for a while, I couldn't find any. I changed my focus and started to take down all the bees I could just blinking and shifting between realms with Paws.

The battle took a while, mainly because they could fly, but none of them seemed to be especially strong or to have an exceptional ability that put them above E-Rank.

Despite them clearly not being the elite from the Queen Bee's hive, the attack still was successful, and a lot of beasts died.

In the human side, we didn't lose anyone since Hayley never let the bees kill any of our people, but some of them got injured and poisoned by the stings.

By the morning, the battle was over, and the corpses of the bees and beasts were laying around filling the place with the smell of blood and charred meat.

Milo and a Shield specialist that came with Blake had high fever as a reaction of the toxins of the stings. We gave them an antidote that we had prepared beforehand, and a chubby guy with some kind of healing ability is taking care of them, so for the meantime, they are out of danger…