A Joytoy’s Journey to become a Hive-Queen [A SCS Fanfic]

Chapter 78 – Bob, uh… Tiny the builder!

“In my study of the old media landscape, I have come across a few interesting tropes and worldwide phenomena that are quite unlike the media landscape we have today. Specifically, widespread series that seemed to find a wider market, despite cultural differences. Of course, globalisation was already widespread, but there were still some differences that had yet to be overcome. These differences, however, were often ignored in regards to series and media entertainment directed at children. While the specifics might have been different depending on the country, there are large parts of the childhood media that were known across the globe, even if they might not have been seen by everyone.

Needless to say, in this day and age, such is the default as companies strive to push their ad-ridden entertainment slop into as many faces as they can manage. Art is dead, and we’ve killed it.”

  -  Excerpt from ‘Art is dead’, 2057

The meeting didn’t last too long, nobody wanted to waste any time. The longer we waited, the more likely it was for the antithesis to get enough of a swarm together to seriously threaten our position, at which point nuking the place was pretty much the only viable option.

As I had expected, Spark was rather energetic, zipping around like a Daemon addict on an overdose. In a way it was quite cute to watch, although I didn’t really have time to focus on that too much. The Hives still needed to be defended, and since I was one of our best fighters at the moment, at least amongst the rest of Us, my presence was needed.

In exchange, one of our attendant drones was sent to keep in contact with Spark. Celine was the lucky winner of the draw, so she was the one to keep an eye on the overeager Fox-girl. And, just between ourselves, to get a few good angles on her. The Burdened took great care to archive those memories.

We also set aside our Vultures and a few Silthens and Hatchlings, as many as we could bear, to help Spark with whatever she would need. Her request about our possible… evolution was a bit strange, although, in the grand scheme of things, nothing too out of the ordinary. Very little change was required to adapt the metabolism and digestive tract of our Hatchlings to enable them to take a shit.

In effect we made their bodies less efficient, which was counter to what you would normally try for, but with the Hexclaws being what they were, that wasn’t really a downgrade. At least not a permanent one.

For obvious reasons Snuffles was involved. Can’t take a shit if you don’t have anything to eat, and, considering the now much lower efficiency, they now had to eat much more to keep themselves going.

Jenna was the most involved with helping Spark. She still had the industrial construction drones laying around from the time she repaired the Rose Carpet and scrapped part of the junk in the old industrial district, and after some upgrades they were more than sufficient for the task at hand, replacing large swaths of soil according to Sparks wishes, and reinforcing potential weak points in the ground that would make planting impossible.

While they all worked, I jumped into yet another cave, form shifting from default Hexclaw Hive-Queen to a partial mix between Hive-Queen and a Sotternos Reaper, a sort of half-snake, half-spider abomination that was quite agile and very good at ripping apart larger numbers of smaller models.

The main benefit of this form was the much increased range I now had available to me, with three immensely long tails, four overly long arms, and a slightly taller frame. I didn’t waste any time using it to my advantage, ripping apart the smaller models trying to bury me with sheer numbers.

While that was going on, I kept a careful eye on my surroundings, this was as much clean up as it was me trying to get better at fighting on my lonesome, with as little interfacing with the chorus as I could manage.

A biological rifle formed on my back, similar to the one I had used earlier, although a bit more efficient than my first attempt. Multitasking on my own was a whole lot harder, but I did my best to train it, trying to snipe the model Fives and Six at the other end of the cave, while continuing to kill the aliens around me.

Truth be told, it was far from as effective as I was hoping for, but it wasn’t like I had years worth of training or something. This was quite hard to do, so it would take time. Even if that delay and my inefficiency with it all annoyed me.

I kept up the training for as long as I could, but eventually more reinforcements came rushing into the cave, this time bigger models. There was a very strange variant of the model Eleven we had seen a few times by now, a bit smaller and flightless. It seemed to be similar to a large lion or something, but also not. It still had wings, but they were too small to be usable for flight, instead more focused as a sort of powerful fist or something similar. Watching it fight was weird.

Still, it was a damn threat, and the moment I saw it, I aborted my attempts at training, focusing on what I was able to do already.

My form shifted once more, the elongated limbs growing shorter and thicker, and soon my eight arms became four, muscular and as armored as I could manage to act as a shield. In exchange I grew an additional tail, for a total of four, two for stability, two for attacks, and braced myself for impact, knowing that the model Eleven-M wouldn’t waste any time trying to crash into me and bowling me over.

It hurt a lot, despite my best attempts to prepare, but the preparation wasn’t wasted. I kept my footing, my two tails helping out with stopping me from being pushed over, while my other two, a bit longer and with long blades at the end, lashed out at the model Eleven-M, my hands currently occupied wrestling the thing.

During the days I was undergoing the operation for my body mods, we had learned a great deal about the usage of our various weapons, and the different materials we could use to upgrade ourselves. In that way I was a bit behind, not really stocked up on the more esoteric stuff, something I had to rectify soon. But even then, I had more than enough knowledge about the more basic elements in my repertoire to know how to form an effective weapon.

My tails bit into the Elven-M’s hide, cutting through its carapace with only mild difficulty. Once the blades were buried inside its body, I deployed the barbs I had prepared, before I pulled with all my might. The thing was tough, but I had prepared for that by increasing my muscle mass quite substantially. With a groan of effort, I ripped my tails free, tearing off chunks of its flesh, making it silently scream in agony, or maybe just anger.

It stumbled, now weakened, and I didn’t let off, repeating the process, while simultaneously using the last of my biomass reserves to reinforce the armor on my back to defend against the smaller aliens using this stalemate to jump me.

Sadly, it wasn’t quite perfect, and a few model Fours managed to get their tentacles through weaker points of the armor, which hurt like a motherfucker, but I gritted my teeth and held on. The model Eleven-M shouldn’t live for much longer and I couldn’t afford to let go of it right now.

Of course, I wasn’t alone. The Queen’s Guard was nearby and they did their best to kill as many of the aliens as they could. The issue was that even they were in a bit of danger this deep in, the aliens sheer numbers a threat to them.

It didn’t help that the model Fives were still raining down quills, not caring at all about hitting their brethren, which made it quite a feat to escape their bombardment. The Assassins, who had taken on the names Memento and Mori, did their best to deal with them, but it was becoming clear that it might be best to upgrade them soon.

Finally the model Eleven-M faltered, my continued attacks with my tail blades too much for it to handle, and I could move once more. Shifting my form, I returned to my strange mix from before, shifting my head to resemble Snuffles snout, taking a huge bite out of the now dead model Elven-M to replenish some of my biomass.

With me finally free to move again, the tide of the battle turned once more, and I jumped into the fray with ferocity, limbs dancing around me like a very freaky looking blender. Turning the fucked up plants around me into a smoothie, I continued to work my way deeper, evading some, but killing most of the xenos I came across.

It would take some time to clear out this sector of the Hive, but things were a bit easier now, especially because of a new concoction of toxins Nym had come up with and distributed amongst our Silthen, to weaken the aliens even more.

I kept a mental eye on Seraphine, giddy about watching her fight. I was good at squishing the big bad evil guys, but she was just so much more graceful! Really, I was a bit envious. Maybe I should ask her to make me look a bit prettier as well?

Okay, maybe I was just being silly. I loved being a giant scorpion, being the Protector of our Hive and the Fortress for the rest of Us to rely on. I had a very important job and I should focus on doing it!

At the moment, I was helping Jenna and Spark with the soil replacement. To make things easier for Jenna’s construction drones, I used my massive pincers to move away the bad soil. Not quite what I was designed for, but playing excavator wasn’t a bad thing. And I could stick close to Spark!

I loved Spark, she was so cute and energetic and always on the move. And she was so smart, too! At first I thought she’d be a bit of a brat or something, but despite her rather small frame, she was a genius. Like, a proper genius. It made me feel bad about thinking about her like that in the first place.

“This acre first,” Spark said, pointing at an area I had cleared a moment before. “It’s going to serve as a nice foundation, and with the ground being as brittle as it is, the roots should have an easy time going deep.”

“Okay, one moment,” Jenna replied, her drones moving over to the plot of land that was outlined.

I watched them both work through my sensors, not stopping my work, of course. At the same time, I kept in contact with the rest of Us, halfway immersed in the harmony to make sure I didn’t miss anything and could forward anything important either way.

Nym, another cutey, had come up with new toxins for Us to use against the aliens, and while I wasn’t exactly made for that kind of stuff, I did have some ability to deploy them, which I made use of to cordon off the area. It wouldn’t be bad for Spark’s forest, apparently, but it would help with keeping the evil plants out.

Turning, I buried my pincers in the ground once more, starting another run. It would have been faster if I could shapeshift like Seraphine could, making my pincers bigger, but it wasn’t too big of a problem. Just would take a little longer, is all.

Some of the soil I pulled into my storage. It wasn’t really useful as biomass, at least not in any efficient way, but I could still use it to start production on more hatchlings with the rest of the biomass I had stored up, and I could use the fabricator I was originally given to help Jenna’s Sentinel production, to pull any useful minerals and elements out of it. 

Most of them weren’t directly useful to me, Carbon for example wasn’t that useful on its own, but other stuff, like Hydrogen and Oxygen, was a bit more useful. There weren’t many useful elements still in this soil, part of the reason we were replacing it, but even the trace amounts would add up over time.

For that reason, Jenna had parked the Bastion of Hope nearby, Vultures and Shuttles carrying a good chunk of the remaining old soil to the fabricators on board to be refined. There wasn’t much storage space left, which is why Jenna had already planned an expansion of the Corvette.

That would happen the next day, she wanted to get the ball rolling first. Time was of the essence, after all.

While I was busy cleaning up the old soil, I kept in contact with Junior and another Burdened, who had taken the name Orion. She was our resident expert on Hexclaws, having taken great pains to learn as much about Us as she could, after Junior had first expressed her concerns about our issues.

We were discussing potential upgrades for me, a few of the ideas came from hearing what Jenna wanted to do with the Bastion of Hope, while other things were more focused around what I wanted personally. We would go over all of that with Seraphine during the night. 

The day was already close to its end, and soon we would start our resting cycle, during which I was hoping to get some additional upgrades done. It wasn’t that I wasn’t effective, but it was becoming clear that I hadn’t been upgraded ever since Seraphine got me.

The wounds I had suffered a couple of days prior were proof enough of that.

Finishing yet another bulldozing trip, I turned once more, doing one last run for this corner of our defences. Idly, I watched Jenna’s drone put down new soil, purchased by Spark to work best with what he had planned. At the same time, I checked in with the other groups we had working on similar tasks, to speed up the process.

Our progress was quite good, faster than I would have imagined. Still, I kept my enthusiasm about it all in check. Wouldn’t want to get surprised by sudden setbacks. Some of the trees were already seeded at some locations, Jenna’s Sentinels helping with the growth by supplying some protector grade fertiliser I couldn’t understand the inner workings of.

Connecting to the call with Spark once more, since I couldn’t talk on my own, I pushed the last pile of old soil to the side.

“Okay, I’m all done here~ Where do you want me to head next?”

She thought for a moment, before pointing towards a stretch of empty land not far from us, located between two of Jenna’s defensive installations. “Probably best to start there, to make sure we can put a proper defensive network down. Will take some time until we can come over, but if the prep is already done, things will go faster.”

“I can lay down some of my own. Won’t be perfect, since I’m not exactly made for that, but it could help speed things up more, right?”

“Oh, if you can do that, that’ll help. As long as we have the soil distributed, Legion’s Sentinels can help with evening it out.”

I jiggled from side to side with giddiness. “Leave it to me, Sparky!~~”

She giggled at that, and I quickly went over to pick up more of the fresh soil, storing it into the so-far empty part of my storage. I didn’t have a lot of space left, but the sooner we were done here, the better.

It didn’t take me long to get everything prepped, even though I had to do a few trips to pick up more fresh soil. By the time I was finally done, Jenna’s Sentinels had already begun to spread it out evenly, which left me open for my next trip.

Turning, I started my trek back to pick up more fresh soil, when the rest of Us suddenly went into overdrive.

Deeper into the Hive next to ours, some of our Silthens had noticed a large group of high digit models. Mostly between Fifteen to Nineteen, but there were signs of a few Twenty-Ones, as well as a Twenty-Three that was being grown.

Not needing any encouragement, I turned and began to burrow down into the ground. Seraphine was busy dealing with a bigger cave, and nobody else could deal with them. I kind of really didn’t want to, since chances were good that I would be hurt again, but this was my responsibility and I wasn’t going to run away from it.

I took my time to find the perfect approach. It was harder than I wanted it to be, since I had to rely on my other sensors to pick out their locations, but soon I found a few of them separated from the group.

I didn’t wait for them to group up again, simply bursting out of the ceiling of the cave they were located in, and dropping down on the group. Many of them died from my sheer weight, the model Fifteens and Sixteens not exactly built to withstand that kind of abuse, but the two model Nineteens, one a K variant, were too far away for me to hit them. 

Before I even got up, I raised my left pincer, the flamethrower already burping flames into the surrounding area, before I unleashed the full brunt of the protector grade napalm-equivalent on the unsuspecting xenos. They didn’t have any time to react, and soon they were burning brightly.

I stepped onto the head of a model Sixteen that had survived, turning and gripping the model Fifteen that was trying to get enough distance to hit me with its weird projectiles. My pincer closed around its body, crushing it and shearing it in two. 

The rest of the survivors wouldn’t be able to get away before the flames consumed them, and I wasn’t exactly flame proof either. Leaving them to their fate, I quickly burrowed down once more, escaping the hellish scene I had caused.

The main group was close by, and I made my way over, punching through the side of the cave and once more putting down the flaming hot death with my pincer. I didn’t know where the model Twenty-Ones were, and they were my main worry at the moment.

Within moments the cave was burning hot enough to melt stone, and I withdrew, waiting for more input from the rest of Us to spot more big xenos.

I didn’t have to wait long, before one found the model Twenty-Ones. Or at least one, and to say she found it would be wrong as well. The familiar feel of a voice being ripped out from the chorus made me shudder, alerting me to the xenos presence, and I quickly made my way over, before it had time to move on.

The problem was that the cave it was in was a bit too big to rely only on my flamethrower, so I had to get in there myself. Crashing through the ceiling, I dropped down close to the middle of the cave, by sheer fluke nipping one of the Twenty-Ones in the side with my legs.

It wasn’t dead, but it was wounded.

Making myself as big as I could, I turned in a circle, using my long tails as oversized whips, hitting most of them before they could retaliate. It wouldn’t be more than a glancing blow, but my hope was that it gave me the time to pinpoint their location and deal with them quickly.

The one that was wounded had just gotten up, when my pincer found its throat, crushing it without too much worry. Throwing the corpse through the cave, at one of the other Twenty-Ones that my sensors had picked up on, I turned to deal with the next, only to feel something jump onto my back.

My armor held, but it was a bit of an awkward position to be in. My tails could reach towards my back, but despite my resemblance with scorpions, I wasn’t actually one, and my tails weren’t exactly designed for that.

Ignoring it for a moment, I charged into the Twenty-One I had turned towards, crushing it between my pincers and the cave wall. The impact rattled me a bit, but sadly it didn’t dislodge the alien on my back.

The other aliens had now all recovered from my sudden entrance, and soon I found myself facing off against four of them. That was three more than I was comfortable with, but I didn’t have time to complain about it.

I wasn’t sure if Twenty-Ones were smarter, or they just had a better understanding of weak points, but two were immediately trying to bite through my joints. My tails found one, leaving a deep gash along its back, while the other was hit by my pincer, doing nothing more than maybe giving it a slight concussion.

The Hard-Light emitters installed all over me lit up, as did my kinetic weaponry. It didn’t do much to hurt them, but it was a distraction, one I used immediately by turning towards my adversaries, the autocannon and the flamethrower both already starting to spew death in their direction.

Much to my dismay, one of the Twenty-Ones had recovered much faster, and jumped my left pincer, trying to get its maw around the joint attaching it to my body.

I couldn’t quite reach it at the moment, having to deal with the second Twenty-One first. It luckily died relatively quickly, when my autocannon hit it two times, exploding large parts of its body, but I didn’t get time to celebrate.

The third jumped me, the one on my back now trying to bite through my tails, and for a moment I panicked a little. I wasn’t sure how long I could hold out, and with my left pincer unable to move, I had to find a way to dislodge them.

Flailing wildly with whatever limbs I could bare, I managed to finally knock the one on my back off, smashing it into the wall next to me, but the one on my pincer didn’t let go and I could feel my joint slowly giving way.

With no other option, I resorted to a body check, as best as I could perform one anyway, and that finally got it loose, but I screamed internally when it took a good portion of my chitin armor with it, leaving my limb now dangerously exposed.

It hurt like a bitch, but I lowered my pincer, grabbing the alien as best as I could and dousing it in flames, while I tried to pierce the one behind me with my tails. The third was just in the process of getting up, and I used my autocannon to keep it at bay, before a lucky shot exploded its skull.

Great, two more to go. Correction, one more to go.

The one under my left pincer was slowly turning to charcoal, and I turned to try and get the last one. Much to my dismay, it pounced at just that moment, its maw closing around my already wounded limb, biting clean through it and ripping my pincer off entirely.

I howled inwardly, trying to cope with the pain, while I finished my movement, just running into it without any finesse. It clawed at my face, hitting two of my eyes. One was wounded, but the other was completely gouged out by its claws, before I finally smashed it into the wall.

I didn’t relent until it finally stopped moving, and I took a step back, trying to calm myself down. Apart from my pincer and my eyes, I was largely unhurt, a few scratches and bites having managed to damage my back armor and two of my tails, but nothing too worrisome.

Doing multiple sensor sweeps, I tried to find any more xenos, but it seemed like I was safe for the moment. Now, what to do about my pincer?

Without it, burrowing was a bit of a pain, and the agony from having it ripped off was nauseating. Maybe I could reattach it? But I couldn’t get any of the tools I needed for that, unable to spend points as I was.

Luckily I wasn’t alone, and while I had kind of missed it in the chaos of the short altercation, the rest of Us had already sent out a Spotter and a few of the War Drones we had on standby. They’d get here relatively soon, with the help of some of the Silthens, but just to make it easier for them, I started to use my autocannon to shoot my way through the ceiling on the opposite side of the cave.

I wasn’t that far under the ground, luckily enough, but I was still careful not to collapse the entire ceiling on top of me.

With the help of the Spotter I was able to reattach my pincer, even if I would have to take it slow for the rest of the night. And hot damn, was I looking forward to that. A bit of rest was just what the doctor ordered.

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At the moment you can read three chapters ahead on 'A Joytoy's journey to become a Hive-Queen'!

Merry christmas, everyone! Today I learned something new about patreon. Last chapter I mentioned that you won't be able to join while the payments are paused, but appearently that's not the case. You can still join up, although you'll be charged as usual. Just wanted to clarify this. I won't be posting anything on patreon until the end of January, but as of the 24th, there are still three chapters of Joytoy to read ahead.

Thanks everyone for all the support. And have a nice christmas! <3

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