The Eccentric Entomologist is Now a Queen's Consort-Chapter 800: The Schemer Watching (1)

Chapter 800: The Schemer Watching (1)
"Helpful and dangerous," she said. "Of course."
She wiped her hand on her trousers and rolled her shoulders.
Tactically, the place was both a blessing and a nightmare.
The crystal trunks offered plenty of cover. Line-of-sight would be short. Good if something threw projectiles. Bad if something liked to lunge from behind.
She drew one of her blades and used the tip to carve tiny marks into the nearest trunk.
Breadcrumbs.
If she had to run, she wanted some hope of not sprinting in circles.
She moved between the columns, steps soft on the moss.
The jelly constructs ignored her, drifting along their own paths. Once, one floated close enough that she felt its mana field brush her skin—a tingling sensation, not immediately hostile.
"Let’s keep it that way," she murmured, easing past.
Near a cluster of three columns that leaned together, she found a small hollow filled with crystalline shards.
They gleamed faintly, as if recently broken.
She crouched and sifted through them.
Several were worthless, just sharp glass. A few, though, had solid cores that pulsed steadily.
She collected those.
"Mini-hoard," she said. "Leftovers from something bigger dying here."
Her pack straps dug into her shoulders.
She imagined walking back into Kael’s war room, dropping the bag on the table, and watching his eyes as he weighed what she had brought.
Not just metal and cores, but proof. Routes. Patterns.
She imagined the Dominion’s mage-corps leaning over her maps, arguing over how to weaponise it all.
She imagined, briefly, what it would be like to have her name etched on the first real wound in Ashen River.
’Rhaen Var’s route,’ some scholar would mutter years from now, tracing a line she had walked alone.
The thought was warm for exactly one heartbeat.
Then it crashed against the memory of Darec’s broken body and Sera’s scream cutting off in the shaft.
Her jaw tightened.
"If I walk out of here," she told the empty air, "you walk out with me. In what I carry."
Saying it didn’t change anything, but it set her spine again.
She rose, adjusted the weight of the pack, and moved on.
The second floor was quieter than the first.
Quieter in sound, at least.
The mana here wasn’t screaming or surging like angry water. It flowed in slow, looping currents, drifting between columns, pooling on the moss in soft glows.
Visually, it was almost peaceful.
Rhaen didn’t trust it for a moment.
The more beautiful a battlefield looked, the nastier it usually was under the skin.
She tested her footing every few steps. The moss squished, but it didn’t try to wrap around her boots or drink her directly. The leeches clustered mostly on the crystal bases, uninterested in her as long as she didn’t stand still too long.
She catalogued it all in her head.
Cover: abundant.
Ranged lines: short.
Climbing paths: some, via ridged columns.
Retreat options: almost none, unless you counted ’up’ into the mana shaft she had just come down from. And the dungeon had made its stance on retreats very clear.
She moved from trunk to trunk, marking each with the smallest of cuts—a system only she and a few Kharadorn scouts would recognise.
Two lines: safe from this direction.
One line: safe but slow.
Three dots: don’t step here unless you want to lose a limb.
By the tenth tree, her shoulder started to ache from the repeated motion.
By the fifteenth, the ache had settled into a familiar rhythm.
"See, Kael?" she muttered. "I’m even making you a nice, tidy legend to go with your maps."
No one laughed.
The first sign that something down here had sharper teeth than leeches came not from sight, but from sound.
A faint, crystalline click.
She froze mid-step.
The click had come from ahead and slightly above—like glass tapping glass.
Slowly, she eased back behind the nearest trunk and pressed herself against the cool surface.
Nothing moved in front of her. The jellies drifted lazily. The distant moss glowed.
The click came again. Softer this time.
It could have been a natural settling sound, crystals growing or cooling.
It could also have been something with a jaw.
Rhaen counted ten breaths, then risked a glance around the trunk.
Nothing obvious.
She scanned the columns’ upper halves.
Still nothing.
"Paranoid saves lives," she whispered. "Paranoid saves lives."
She stayed where she was for another slow count.
When no further sound came, she filed the direction away in her mind and chose a slightly different path, angling to the right.
Maybe it was nothing.
Maybe not.
She preferred to let ’nothing’ stay nothing as long as possible.
She found another resource pocket an hour later.
It was less obviously a room and more like a scar.
One tall crystal trunk had been shattered halfway up, its upper portion lying in jagged pieces across the moss. Mana leaked from the broken core in slow drops, pooling in a shallow basin of light.
Around it, smaller crystals had grown like weeds, twisted by the excess.
Rhaen circled the edge carefully.
Where the mana had been dripping longest, the moss had turned a darker blue, almost black. Her instincts told her that stepping there was a bad idea.
She stayed on the paler patches and leaned in just enough to pry a few solid chunks of core from the fallen trunk.
They hummed in her hands.
"Good," she said, sliding them into a wrapped cloth pouch. "You’ll pay for a healer’s real bed when this is over."
If there is an ’over’, something in her whispered.
She ignored it.
Before leaving, she crouched and brushed two fingers through the air near the leaking mana, feeling how it moved.
Slow.
Sticky.
"Muck for magic," she muttered. "If the League ever taps this, they’ll make horrible things with it."
That thought alone made her more determined to carry as much as she could out.
She turned away.
The deeper she went, the taller the columns grew.
Some reached all the way to the cavern ceiling, disappearing into a haze of light. Others stopped halfway, their tops cut flat as if some giant had sliced through them.
At one point, she passed an area where several trunks had fused together, forming an archway of tangled crystal.
Under it, the moss was worn.
"Traffic," she thought. "Old or new?"
Kneeling, she studied the marks.
They weren’t boot prints, exactly. More like repeated pressure, small points pushed into the moss.
Claws.
She brushed the moss aside with the back of her hand.
Underneath, faint scratches marked the stone.
Not dungeon randomness. A pattern of movement.
Someone—or something—walked here regularly.
She moved on quickly after that, choosing a parallel route.
Her ears strained for another crystalline click.
Fatigue crept up on her quietly.
She had been moving for—she wasn’t sure. Time in a dungeon didn’t behave properly. There was no sun, no changing sky.
Her body, though, kept score.
Her ribs throbbed under the bandage. The pain-dampening patches had dulled, their warmth fading. Her injured arm ached when she lifted it too high.
A normal soldier would have set up a camp by now.
Rhaen carefully crouched behind a wide trunk and pulled out her waterskin.
She drank a small mouthful, swished it around, swallowed.
Her throat thanked her.
She looked at the moss.
"We had an agreement," she told it. "I touch you too long, you eat my focus. I’m not that desperate yet."
She settled for leaning her back lightly against a column instead, letting the cool seep through her coat.
Her eyes drifted shut.
Just for a moment.
Darec’s laugh rolled through her memory again.
Sera’s humming.
Thane’s grumbled complaints about anyone who stepped on his rune-chalk.
Marek’s voice, dry and amused:
’No scream,’ he would’ve said when that stone didn’t cry on the way down.
Her chest tightened.
"Enough," she muttered, snapping her eyes open.
Grief was a luxury she would buy later, with time she didn’t have yet.
For now, she had work.
She pushed off the column and moved on.
The next fork looked simple.
To her left, the crystal trunks spaced out a little, giving a view toward what looked like a wider open area. The moss there was darker. Several jelly constructs drifted in lazy circles above it.
To her right, the trunks thickened, growing closer together. The path narrowed into a kind of crystal thicket.
The air over the open area felt weirdly flat.
Like a held breath.
Rhaen stood still, letting her breathing slow so she could listen properly.
The faint hum of mana. The occasional soft bobbing sound of a jelly moving past.
Under that, a silence that felt... heavy.
Spawn point, her instincts said again.
She couldn’t see anything emerging, no obvious hole in the moss or crack in the stone. But she trusted the prickle crawling up her neck.
"Left is faster," she murmured. "Right is alive longer."
She turned her back on the open space and stepped toward the thicker crystals.
The path took her into dimmer light. The trunks pressed closer, their surfaces cool and smooth. She had to angle her shoulders sometimes to fit.
Her blade scratched more breadcrumbs into their sides.
Within a dozen steps, the open area was out of sight behind her.
For a moment, she almost wished it wasn’t.
At least there, she could see the danger.
Here, it could be three inches away and she wouldn’t know until it bit.
She swallowed and kept walking.
Above her, the shadows moved.
Five small forms clung to the upper halves of the crystal trunks, their bodies blending almost perfectly with the environment.
To anyone without reason to look, they were just a little extra darkness.
To themselves, they were hunters.
Each Chimera Ant scout adjusted its grip, slender legs locking into tiny scratches in the crystal.
Antennae tasted the mana currents, tracing the wake Rhaen left behind.
She smelled different from the dungeon’s usual residents.
Metal. Blood. Sweat. Outside air.
The scouts didn’t chatter like normal insects. Their minds brushed against each other in small pulses, sending simple impressions.
Path.
New scent.
Resource rooms opened.
Safe tiles marked.
Down in the soft dark between trunks, something larger turned its head.
A soldier unit.
Heavier carapace. Stronger mandibles.
It remained still, for now.
The order hummed through the link between them.
Wait.
Watch.
Map her path.
It obeyed.
Rhaen had the feeling of being watched again a few minutes later.
It wasn’t a clear, sharp thing. More like the sense of walking into a tavern and knowing every table had paused mid-conversation to glance your way.
The hairs on her arms rose.
She stopped and turned in a slow circle, blade half-raised.
Columns.
Moss.
Quiet jellies drifting.
Nothing obvious.
She exhaled through her nose.
"Either I’m jumping at shadows," she said under her breath, "or you really are that smug."
She spoke to the dungeon, mostly.
It didn’t answer.
She took a step, then another.
The sense of eyes on her didn’t fade.
"Fine," she said. "Watch. I’ve done dumber shows for worse crowds."