Beesekai [A Monster Reincarnation Isekai]

Allow me to disclose some crucial information. I’ve never really been in a fight.

“Maybe not in your human world, but we’ve had our fair share of battles here. Killing squirrels, the vultures, Yiwi, and everything in between.”

I’m not sure I’d consider force-choking hapless squirrels and entering the mindscape of a crazy vulture king to be a ‘fight’, per se. When I say fight, I mean up close and personal combat, ya’know? The type where you could get punched in the face if you aren’t careful. Because that’s exactly what’s about to happen to me in a few seconds.

Being able to think fast was a godsend, only partly literally. Belial was charging in quicker than my eyes could realistically track, and even Behemoth’s armored legs were coming in for a landing way more rapidly than anyone her size had any right to move. If I didn’t act, getting punched in the face by my kids was the least of my worries; the bees behind me who hadn’t been fast enough or savvy enough to leave the vicinity would get smashed to paste. Again, I’d never been in a proper fight before, but part of that was on me. My Mind was so much more insanely powerful compared to most anything I came across, calling those little slaughters a fight was insulting.

Ten percent. About as much Mind as I used to pick up Yiwi’s Rotor. That was how much of my Mind I used to stop both Behemoth and Belial. The results?

I watched as my moderate feat of concentration, a simple shove, made Belial disappear. The sound of my impact on Belial and Behemoth’s insane bodies, a concussive blast loud enough to make the dead trees quiver, brought silence to the forest. No more animals, not even wind. The world seemed to stop for an instant, until it was broken by Behemoth’s giant frame hitting the ground several meters away and the subsequent sound of grinding as her armor scraped against the ground, the force of my blow still causing her to tumble backwards.

Ah. Right. And that was why I hadn’t had a proper fight in this world.

I searched for Belial, but he was nowhere to be seen. How far had I blasted him? I took a look through his own eyes, but I felt danger and came back to myself. Fighting was pretty easy if you know all of your opponent’s moves. But knowing everything didn’t lessen my surprise when I saw that the danger I was feeling was none other than Behemoth herself, suddenly closer to me than she had been even before I pushed her. How had she recovered so fast? Well, I knew it was thanks to her incredible stamina and physical prowess, but physicality wasn’t useful against me-

“Enno!”

Too fast! Behemoth moved way too fast for a creature her size. Her leg was already rearing to kick me. When had I fallen into her range?! I decided to keep things simple and give another shove, just ten percent again. It wasn’t spread thin between two bees, so it would be even more effective this time.

As expected, my thoughts were faster than Behemoth’s body could ever hope to be. One moment she was raring to dropkick her very own mom, the next she was tumbling away again, crushing dead trees and stones under her weight. I watched with satisfaction as she rolled away, helpless against my Mind’s power. If Belial was blasted away and all it took to deal with Belphegora was a few shoves, this would be way easier than I thought. I really should’ve had more confidence in my raw power.

“Maybe that is true, but you were right to be nervous about getting into an actual fight. Our inexperience has resulted in slow reactions, too many close calls. If we get hit, the result would be much more devastating than the hardened warriors taking a blow or two. We can follow the warriors’ reactions when we watch them because we have plenty of time to think, but not so here. Unless you want to allocate some Mind to a Lock. Ah, but it is probably unnecessary. We are far too powerful to need to resort to such measures.”

I instantly agreed. Maybe it was unrefined, but my raw power of Mind was more than enough to take care of even the Valkybees. The sheer density of my Mind’s power was just incomparable when it came down to it. It was a bit odd for Queen to turn around so suddenly, but it made sense considering how awesome we realistically were. Speaking of the Valkybees, weren’t there three of them in this fight?

The thought brushed against my consciousness as soon as pain blossomed across my jaw. Dull colors whirled across my vision as I spun in the air. My Mind lashed out, uncontrolled and wild, desperately seeking to defend against the sudden danger. What’s going on? Thinking wasn’t an option. All my focus, everything in my thoughts, was thrown completely out of whack, and I barely registered the feeling of my big fat butt crashing into a tree while I tried to process what had just occurred.

Maybe it was thanks to the sudden realization that the danger, while maybe not fatal, was absolutely real. Or maybe it just came off lunch break. But I felt information explode in my head unlike before, tiny moments of time occupying every bit of my thoughts at once. The CBU had finally woke up, just in time to tell me I had, as I feared, been punched straight in the face.

“It took some effort, but I created a weak B-box for the fight. The CBU had no interest in it, so I had to force it to pay attention. Our ‘overwhelming mental power’ might not actually enough to win this outright. I can’t believe we allowed ourselves to be fooled.”

I saw it. Everything that had happened. Belphegora was the culprit, at least partially. Without my noticing, she had teased out my emotions, mainly my overconfidence and pride. How dastardly! To think that her Abilities were at a level that I hadn’t even noticed them. How was that even possible?! I knew her every thought and action! Oh. But she knew that, of course. She had chosen such emotions exactly because she knew how they would affect another’s psyche. Even though I knew what she was doing, I was so overconfident and insistent on my own power that I straight up ignored it as an issue. To make matters worse, her powers even affected Queen’s typically solid rationale. .If I didn’t have a defense against her, Belphegora would actually be the reason I could lose this fight.

As if that wasn’t all, her most developed Abilities weren’t the only things that fooled me. I knew that she’d been working on some rudimentary Ability to create illusions, fueled by her power over emotion, but for it to have progressed this far already…

“To be fair, the way she tried to make Belial invisible was not very effective. If we weren’t at the mercy of our own hubris, it would have been simple to deal with him.”

During the Lemonholm expedition, Belphegora had started trying to create illusions from Mind, to prevent a similar situation where the bees would be trapped and need to hide constantly. I thought it was an interesting project, and it fit her skillset well, so I encouraged it. After all, who knew how that might help in the future? Of course, she hadn’t had enough time to develop it before this battle, so the results were corny at best. Looking back, Belial had looked more like a weirdly shaped rock or a vaguely transparent bee. Nobody would realistically be fooled by it, and it might take weeks before the illusions were developed enough to fool even a cursory glance. But combined with her acute manipulation of emotion… She’d already turned it into a weapon.

I rubbed my cheek and glared at the clearing, where the three Valkybees were whooping and cheering amongst themselves. One of the three was by far the least enthusiastic. Gentlemanly Belial had indeed been blasted away by my initial shove, but it wasn’t unexpected for them. In fact, Belial had recovered even more quickly than Behemoth and enacted the next part of their plan, where he slinked right towards me, cloaked by Belphegora’s Abilities, and just decked me in the jaw. The fire of their out-of-control emotions was still burning brighter than ever, but even in his current state, Belial glanced at me and shrugged apologetically.

These kids…. Despite the pain I felt, unlike any I’d felt in a long time and hurting me somewhere deeper than just my mandible, I couldn’t help but smile. I was so proud of them. They were strong, smart, and could get shit done, even if they were using me for floor wiping. Any insult I had paid them by holding back were totally out of the window now. I dragged myself from the tree trunk and floated towards them slowly. Their cheering ended abruptly, and they turned.

“Shall we get creative?”

Let’s see if they can earn my creativity first. For now, how about twenty percent?

If Bedivere was an insurmountable mountain the Valkybees worked tirelessly to surpass, then Mother was the very land that mountain sat on. Not something to be surpassed, nor overcome. She was everything, stretching infinitely in every direction and encompassing everything that existed. And yet, they had always wondered, ‘could I win?’

They hated this thought, more than anything else in the world. Mother was their everything. They would give their very lives a thousand times over if it meant protecting her. Merely the thought of fighting her, of injuring her or being injured by her, terrified them to no end.

Why did they think this way? Was it the fault of their elder brother? The circumstances of their birth were no secret to them, and they would be lying if they said they didn’t resent him at least a little bit for what he did to them. Other than Beelzebub. She was grateful. All along, there were two things they always pointed at: Bedivere, and themselves. And it was oh so much easier for they, who loved and respected and idolized their older brother, to look towards themselves and find the fault there.

Until a third player entered the ring. A third thing to point at. Humanity. When the Valkybees present at the dining hall heard Mother’s message, they weren’t angry, nor sad, nor stressed.

They were relieved.

That relief soon turned into those other emotions. To find some release, they took Beryl, who was surely feeling the same, and fought amongst themselves, with a single thought in their Minds. ‘Win.’ Not against each other, nor Beryl. They were protecting their own nascent egos by leaving the dining hall before they could do anything rash, but to the other bees, it simply seemed like they were letting off steam.

Bedivere recognized it and sent Mother to fetch them. Only a warrior on par with the Valkybees could possibly understand their pain, because he too had that terrible, addictive thought. He was the greatest warrior of the hive, the first even. When he emerged from his egg, there were three things he wanted to do. First was to protect the hive from the vultures. Second was to kill the Vulch, something he never had a chance to do. Third was the most pressing, the first thing he thought of when he was born.

‘Could I win?’

He’d resigned himself to never finding out, both a punishment and his own resolve at the same time. But he wanted to give his precious younger siblings a chance to test themselves like he would never let himself do. He’d let them answer the question themselves.

Belphegora scarcely had time to react before the space between her and Behemoth was suddenly empty, Belial disappearing in a flash. Unlike last time, there was no intense sound, no warning of mounting pressure. Belial simply found himself enduring a sudden sharp pain and a view of dead trees more than a kilometer away. Behemoth, first to react, moved to attack Mother, though she still withheld her Ability for the right time. A mistake, perhaps, because the giant bee suddenly had a view of the battlefield from high in the sky, soaring higher than she’d ever gone before. A lurching feeling across her body made her feel ill. She was used to the solid ground, one of the few things capable of handling her weight. The air was scary.

To her credit, Belphegora didn’t waver for an instant. Unlike her siblings, she was more of an expert of combat with Mind, making her uniquely suited yet disadvantaged when it came to a fight with the vastly more powerful Mother. Her trickery wouldn’t work in such a short time, so she elected to follow through with a two-pronged attack. Debris shot towards Mother’s path, nearly as fast as the humans’ metal weaponry, and since that wouldn’t be enough, a mental punch to throw Mother’s psyche off balance would require her to focus on two entirely different dimensions of defense at once. Even if the attacks weren’t successful, it would buy enough time for Belial and Behemoth to recover to some degree. Manipulating two entirely separate planes of existence was a terribly difficult feat, and even the most powerful Mind-users Belphegora had encountered would struggle with such an attack.

“Is twenty too much? He did punch me in the face. Yeah, I know, but again, he did punch me in the face.”

Without paying attention, Mother stopped the debris in mid-air like it had never been moving at all. The mental shove seemed to hit a wall, as if Belphegora was attempting to push an island with bare strength alone. When Mother glanced at her, she realized that the mental attack hadn’t even registered.

“Now that I know your tricks, you might have a harder time, Belphegora. Sucks, I guess, but you’ll have to get more creative.”

Behemoth was still falling. Belial was flying fast enough to reach them in the next few seconds at worst. And yet, despite trying to stall for time only moments before, Belphegora suddenly found herself hoping her comrades would never arrive. Such sheer hopelessness in the face of an impossible foe, one that surpassed Belphegora’s own skills on every level, was simply too exciting. A wild sneer was all she could muster as she prepared for another attack. This time, she’d forgo the mental battle for an extreme use of her Ability and throw Mother completely off her game, even if she knew it was coming. Unlike the unrefined attack of before, this would show the power of practiced skill and her constant training.

“Oh, Belial is here. One sec.”

As if her words were a command from above, Mother’s flippant request was followed by Belphegora being crushed by the surrounding air. She sank to the ground, the pressure mounting exponentially. She looked towards Mother, not recognizing the being that was exerting its Mind freely. That power was never allowed to rear its head, always needing to be used for something else, something more productive. Such a waste. The force pushing her down was like an invisible hand, almost human, yet almost like a bee’s claw, squeezing her without remorse. It was unlike any Mind usage Belphegora had encountered, almost awkward in a way, like the user felt unpracticed and uncomfortable with their own fingers. And yet, that clumsy, unnatural power was a storm that inundated Belphegora completely. Seeing, no, feeling that tiny fraction of a force that shouldn’t exist in the world being used to hold her down was the last straw. A single tear of distilled joy fell from her eye as Belial rocketed in from the forest, primed to clash with the lovely source of that monstrous force.