Myga led the GLYPH girls to their destination – a massive hive high up in the branches of a gargantuan tree a few short miles from the spider girl’s home. While it initially seemed a daunting distance to traverse, especially given that BB was encouraged to not use her jetpack to fly there in order to save it for their escape, Myga came in clutch for the agents yet again as she directed them to a special train system that would quickly take them from one tree to another, slithering around the trunks and branches, down underground through the roots of one before connecting to a neighboring one.
The ride was quick and relatively nice. For Mira, anyway. BB had to keep her eyes shut and have Mira flood her ears with a pretty song to keep from retching when she realized the “train” they were riding was more or less just a giant centipede-like creature…
The hive itself was a gigantic golden palace built around the entire circumference of the tree it was stationed on. From afar it looked similar to the beehives the GLYPH agents were familiar with, but up close it gave off a more regal, palace-like vibe, with genuine artistry and craftsmanship in its architecture. If they’d simply been dumped there upon first arriving in the world without being made aware it was a world of insects, they would have assumed it was manmade.
Though the lower floors of the hive were open to visitors, Myga informed the agents that their actual destination was much higher in the building, and that heading inside under the guise of being three such visitors wouldn’t allow them easy access to those upper floors.
What would was sneaking around to the outer lengths of some of the nearby branches, away from the view of the guards outside the hive. Myga then got to work spewing out webs from her rear end (a sight which had BB turning away and silently gagging) up towards the upper levels of the hive. She then called for the agents to climb atop her back.
“Ew, fuck that…!” BB whispered harshly.
“The sooner we get this done, the sooner we’ll be back home,” Mira said, tugging on BB’s hand to compel her to join her.
With a pouty little growl, BB obliged, hopping up onto Myga’s back and wrapping her arms around Mira. She needed some support to hold onto, but certainly wasn’t going to go touching any more of the spider girl’s body than she had to…
Myga began scaling up the length of webbing, her eight spider legs rapidly dancing along the white rope and quickly covering the distance until the three were up high on the side of the hive.
Locating a nearby open window, Myga crawled along the hive, avoiding the few hexagonal panels she knew to be rigged with secret traps, before hopping inside. With solid ground now beneath them again, BB quickly jumped off of the spider girl’s back and wiggled her butt around like a dog shaking off sprinkler water.
Of course, once that was done, she found a new gross annoyance in the slightly-sticky sensation beneath her sneakers. She raised one foot, and while it came off fine enough, there was the tiniest bit of resistance from the honey-like substance coating the floor. “Ewwwww…!”
“We are on the twentieth level,” Myga said with a whisper. We’ll need to move down to the floor below. There is a chamber there guarding FORMA and other items taken from other worlds.”
As she led the two girls around the twentieth floor, BB turned to Mira and whispered, “What’s this bug chick’s deal anyway? Why’s she know all this shit?”
Mira found herself a bit lost on how to answer that question herself. While she still trusted Myga, she did have to concede that she did not know much about the spider girl. It was quite odd how lucky they were finding someone who was not only aware of their being from another world and the FORMA cards, but also was knowledgeable and capable enough to assist in infiltrating the hive.
But before she could conjure up a response, the trio found themselves at the edge of the current floor. There didn’t seem to be stairs within the upper floors of the hive – likely due to the prevalence of most of its denizens being capable of flight – so they had to stare down over the edge to the lower floor as though it were a cliff overhanging a level below.
Myga pointed out a set of twin doors, with two guards standing on either side. Both were similar in build – six-foot-tall bipedal bee-like men, each armed with a polearm mounted with stingers that would not look out of place on their wielders’ asses.
“Your FORMA should be housed in there. We will have to get rid of the guards somehow.”
With a groan, BB took a step forward, retrieving her Big Bang Bat from her back. Myga had already made it clear before that she wasn’t the fighting type, and BB didn’t clock Mira for one either, leaving that job to her. And while she was more than okay killing bugs, having to interact with them at all was still…ew.
She held the bat up, eyes glancing down at the fuel gauge on the side of the weapon. “Tch. Runnin’ a little low on this stuff…These the only ones we gotta deal with?”
Myga gave a half shrug. “Ideally, yes. There won’t be anyone inside the chamber, and I do not see anyone else patrolling around here. If we can make it quick, they should be our only threats.”
“Aight. I’ll take these fuckers out then,” BB said before nodding her head towards the other two. “Back up.”
As Mira and Myga took a few steps back, BB took a slow practice swing with the bat to ready her arms and get a feel for the angle. When she was ready, she swung again, pulling on the trigger at the same time.
A hatch at the far end of the bat opened up and out came a blast of blue flames. The fire crackled as it soared through the air, down from the twentieth floor to the nineteenth in a wide, semicircular shape.
The sudden blue light and heat caught both guards’ attentions at the same time, though it was too late for either as the blue flames consumed them both, reducing them to charred piles.
Mira flinched and looked away, having not expected to see such a brutal sight. It was only when Myga tapped her hand and compelled her to jump atop her back again that she straightened herself out.
The spider girl dropped down to the lower level, and BB did the same, albeit on her own, and muttering a curse as she felt more of the honey-ish goo squish beneath her shoes. Myga then skittered over to the chamber doors, pushing them open.
Inside, the three women were greeted with an almost obnoxiously-golden room filled with hexagonal glass-like containers, each one housing all sorts of strange objects that were, according to Myga, from many different worlds that the queen’s forces had infiltrated, chief among them several FORMA cards.
“Which one is ours?” Mira asked with a whisper.
Myga slipped over to the right side of the room, and pointed out a display container near the back of the room. “It should be that one. They’re stored here in order, and yours is the most recent one that Vispae has taken.”
“Then let’s grab the shit and get the fuck outta here,” BB said, stepping forward, though not before one of Myga’s spider legs quickly reached out to block her. “Aaaagh! Don’t touch me!” she whimpered pathetically, leaping backward to put distance between them.
“There are traps in here,” Myga warned. “If we touch them, we’ll be immobilized and the guards will be alerted.”
“Gah, then how the fuck do we grab the stupid thing?!”
Mira dropped down from Myga’s back. “Let me handle it,” she said. Before the others could inquire, she closed her eyes and began singing in a very soft, high-pitched tone. BB couldn’t recognize the language, and it almost didn’t even sound like it would be a human one anyway, strange a thought as that was to her.
Either way, when the short little song was completed, Mira’s body seemed to fade away, until she was almost invisible, but not quite. But more importantly than appearing nearly invisible, she was, as she displayed by stepping forward through the trap Myga had saved BB from without triggering it, intangible.
“Freaky…” BB muttered.
Mira arrived at the container, reaching her hand through the glass as if it weren’t there, solidifying her fingers just enough to grab hold of the FORMA before granting her hand and the card that intangibility again, retracting her arm, and returning to Myga and BB’s side.
“Very well done,” Myga said with a smile. “I would certainly like to know how you accomplished that.”
“Thank you! It’s a spell that-”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever!” BB whisper-barked, already turning and heading for the door. “We got the shit, so let’s get the fuck outta here already!”
Myga scooped Mira up and placed her on her back, hurrying to join BB as she pushed through the doors.
Before the trio could head back up to the twentieth floor, however, they were greeted by whom BB and Mira naturally assumed could only be Vispae – the queen’s top soldier, as they’d been warned by Myga.
He looked similar to the guards BB had disposed of, but bigger – a good two feet or so taller – and bulkier, with longer wings, and wielding what appeared to be two stinger-like swords in both hands.
When he spoke, his voice pained the GLYPH agents’ ears. It hit them like harsh vibrations that rattled their eardrums and sent little tremors down their skin, and though he stood on the far end of the wide open room, it was as though his voice came through earbuds at a volume that shouldn’t be possible.
“THIEVING ALIENS. THAT CARD BELONGS TO THE QUEEN.” His head jerked around rapidly with each word, twitching in every direction and only further adding to the discomfort of the GLYPH girls. “UNHAND IT AND YOU WILL DIE QUICKLY AND PAINLESSLY.”
“Tch, get bent, bozo, you stole the shit from us!” BB spat back, fingers digging into her ears to scratch at the irritated drums.
Vispae ignored her, focusing his big, bulbous eyes on Myga, who seemed to slightly shy away from the sudden eye contact. “THE TRAITOROUS SCIENTIST RETURNS.”
Though she was clearly uneasy at being in Vispae’s presence, Myga held strong and replied, “The FORMA do not belong to us, Vispae! We are damaging the very structure of Existence by taking-”
“SILENCE, SPIDER. YOU DIE TODAY. YOUR FATHER WILL NOT STAY MY BLADE THIS TIME.”
And then, in the blink of an eye, Vispae suddenly shot the stinger of one of his swords, and it crossed the large distance between him and Myga. While her reactive yelp and dive to the side helped save her from instant death, it was not enough to avoid taking the stinger directly through one of her palms, tugging her backward into the far wall and locking her in place, wailing in pain.
“Let me heal you!” Mira said, hurrying to pull the stinger blade out and start singing a spell, hoping that BB could keep Vispae at bay long enough.
The bee soldier’s wings became a blur and he flew directly towards Myga to make sure to finish her off personally. BB scrambled to intercept, shooting a blue wave of flame to cut off his flight path.
He maneuvered around it quite easily, rising up and spinning around in a rollercoaster-like loop. But while the flame shot did not land, it did do its job of taking Vispae’s attention, causing him to change his path towards BB.
She blocked the incoming slash of his stinger sword with her bat, quickly pulling on the trigger to let out just a little bit of fire and catch one of Vispae’s shoulders, causing him to quickly leap away and land on his feet. With a roar, she rushed up and took a heavy swing at him, but he spun around her at incredible speed, thrusting the stinger towards the center of her back.
While it was too late to move her body or adjust her arms since she was already committed to her baseball swing, she was able to pull on the trigger again, this time shooting out a large enough burst of blue flame from it like a jet, instantly sending her zooming off to the side and away from harm. However, she did unfortunately stumble as the sudden rocket thrust came to an end as the bottoms of her shoes became momentarily stuck in the honey glaze of the floor.
Vispae dived towards her again to take advantage of the moment, but it was at that time that Myga rotated her spider body around and shot out a thick strand of silk webbing, catching one of Vispae’s wings and halting his dash towards BB.
Mira freed the stinger from both the wall and Myga’s hand, and finished her healing hum right after. The spider girl watched in awe as the massive, bloody gaping hole in her hand sealed tight, and most of the pain faded away.
The bee soldier sliced at Myga’s web to free himself before spinning around to face the incoming BB. The fighters exchanged several swings with their weapons, with each clash sending loud, ringing clangs of metal around the open room. Loud enough to attract the attention of more guards, who came flying up onto the nineteenth floor to inspect, and when they spotted their commander locked in battle, they readied themselves to fight as well.
“We have to go now!” Myga called out, leaping back up to the twentieth floor. “We cannot fight them all!”
“BB!” Mira called out.
Gritting her teeth, BB smacked away Vispae’s stinger sword, but as much as she wanted to take another swing and knock the bug bastard’s head off, two more guards had come flying in, ready to impale her from behind, forcing her to defend against them instead.
Though she deftly dodged, blocked, and parried each weapon that came at her, as she danced around her opponents, her feet became stuck on the honey floor, causing her to stumble mid-swing.
Vispae knocked away her bat, though she managed to bob and weave between his stinger sword’s incoming series of stabs. She then prepared to throw punches into his face, but as soon as she looked into the bee soldier’s eyes, her phobia struck again, and she jumped away, not wanting to physically touch him with her hands, even if it was to kill him.
However, in her panicked backing up, she activated her jetpack, which quickly sent her flying up into the sky with a surprised yelp. Luckily, she was able to adjust right before she could slam her skull into the ceiling, swerving around towards the open space that Myga and Mira had retreated to.
“Wait, shit, my bat!” she yelled, turning back to see Vispae and the other bee soldiers take flight to chase her.
Before she could foolishly fly back towards them to retrieve her Big Bang Bat, though, Myga came to the rescue, shooting out a web rope around it and tugging it towards her. BB intercepted, catching it and yanking it free from the silk rope just in time to spin around and behead the first of the bee soldiers pursuing her.
Myga, with Mira still atop her back, leaped from the window and down towards a branch below. BB soon followed, blasting out from the window thanks to her jetpack. The bee soldiers were impressively fast flyers themselves, however, and were not far behind.
“Myga, hang on!” Mira said, urging the spider girl to hold onto her this time as she activated her jetpack and took off to join BB at a higher elevation. “The BUBBLE is this way, BB!”
The GLYPH agents set their sights high into the sky, at that faintly distorted, dome-shaped space they’d used to come to this world. All they had to do was make it back through that BUBBLE with the FORMA in hand, and they’d be safe from their bee pursuers.
“Wait, why didn’t you drop this chick off?!” BB yelled at Mira as she realized she was still holding onto Myga.
“They’ll kill her!” Mira replied.
“So?! That ain’t our pro-!”
“YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE!”
BB was interrupted as Vispae, leading the charge, fired off his remaining sword’s stinger blade. It cleaved a hole right through her jetpack, instantly killing it off and sending her into a freefall.
Myga quickly shot out another line of webbing, catching BB’s back and retracting her up to join the other two girls. Though the added weight was noticeably slowing down the speed of Mira’s own jetpack, leading to the gap between them and the bee soldiers to close…
Though she hated the feeling of dangling high up by a gross spider monster lady’s webbing, even BB realized it was the only thing keeping her alive. And so, she grit her teeth through her discomfort, focusing her attention on the pursuing bee soldiers.
Her bat only had enough fuel in it for one good shot. And while she could use it to give the girls one last high-speed jet boost towards the BUBBLE, BB was more interested in using it to kill those gross bug men chasing after them, and that was her final decision.
“BURN IN HELL, YOU BASTARDS!” She roared, swinging her bat and launching one big final wave of flames down at the pursuers.
Vispae, unfortunately, managed to avoid being devoured by the blue fire, though he did not go completely unscathed as the embers bit away at his left-side wings, forcing him to stop his ascent and trail away back down towards the nearest tree for safety.
The two guards behind him were not so quick to react, and were completely devoured by the blast, reduced to soot that quickly scattered in the wind, erasing them both from existence.
Mira led the girls through the final stretch into the BUBBLE, and as they stumbled into a sloppy pile on the asphalt of the back alley on the other side, the BUBBLE shut closed behind them, leaving them all to breathe a sigh of relief and catch their breaths.
