The Eccentric Entomologist is Now a Queen's Consort-Chapter 808: Shield, Drag, Slam (3)

Chapter 808: Shield, Drag, Slam (3)
"Can we..." she started. "Can we not just watch her bleed?"
Elowen glanced at Mikhailis.
Mikhailis didn’t answer right away.
He watched as Rhaen forced herself up again, limped to the Warden’s corpse, and started to work.
Plate shards came loose. The core came out. The ants’ view zoomed in as he willed it, focusing on the fist-sized crystal in her hand.
<Guardian-class core,> Rodion noted. <Hybrid attribute density: defence, kinetic dampening, minor reflective capacity. Estimated value on open market: sufficient to fund a mid-sized war band.>
Or a nice date,
Mikhailis thought.
There was a beat of silence.
<...Your economy calibration is concerning.>
He almost smiled.
He did not let it reach his mouth.
"A hell of a pathfinder," he said quietly.
Elowen turned her head toward him.
"Pathfinder," she repeated.
He met her gaze.
Her eyes were cool silver, but there was heat under them now.
"We’re using her," she said.
It was not a question.
Mikhailis did not try to lie.
"Yes," he said. "We are."
Cerys pushed away from the tent pole.
"You sent the ants down there to watch her," she said, voice low. "You let that thing almost crush her so you could record its movement and the floor’s reactions."
"I didn’t let it almost crush her," he replied. "The dungeon did that. I just didn’t step in to stop it."
Vyrelda snorted softly.
"Such a comforting difference," she said.
Elowen’s fingers curled together on the table.
"At what point," she asked quietly, "does ’accounting’ turn into letting good people die because it is efficient?"
The tent went still.
Mikhailis looked back at the projection.
Rhaen was binding her wounds with shaking hands, moving like someone who had forgotten how to fall over.
She is enemy,
a small, cold part of him thought.
Kharadorn’s favourite knife. If she walks out with that core and those maps and hands them to Kael, that’s another problem for us later.
Another part answered.
*She is also the reason our hive hasn’t lost a single soldier on that floor. She opened the route. She showed you where the floor eats stones. She distracted the Warden while your scouts mapped every pattern."
He inhaled slowly.
"We are surrounded by bigger predators," he said finally. "The League, Kharadorn, the Concordat, Valtis. Every one of them wants that dungeon core."
He tapped the edge of the table lightly with one finger.
"If we are going to keep Silvarion from turning into a battlefield, we need every advantage we can get. Including enemies who are currently stabbing in the same direction as us."
Elowen’s jaw tightened.
"That is not an answer," she said.
"It’s the only one I have right now," he replied.
Inside his head, Rodion spoke again.
A small pause.
<External operative survival probability now nineteen to twenty-four percent, assuming no new major threats are triggered in the next layer.>
That low?
Mikhailis thought.
Neither have we,
he answered.
"She’s a hell of a pathfinder," he said again, softer.
Lira shifted behind him.
"She’s a person," the maid said.
Her tone was quiet but edged.
Mikhailis glanced back at her.
Lira’s face was as smooth as ever, elegant features composed. Only the tightness around her eyes gave her away.
"People die in dungeons," Vyrelda said. "That place eats names and spits out bones."
"We don’t have to help it chew," Cerys snapped.
Serelith watched them bicker, a small smile at the corner of her mouth.
"You are all very cute," she murmured. "The girl herself doesn’t seem interested in being saved."
On the pane, Rhaen finished binding her leg, adjusted her pack, and pushed herself upright again.
She limped once, then forced her steps to even out, moving toward the newly opened shaft.
Elowen looked back at the image.
"If she dies," the queen said, "will that make you feel safer?"
Mikhailis watched Rhaen pause at the edge of the access, looking down into the shaft. He could almost feel her weighing choices from here.
"No," he said. "But if she turns her knife at us later, I’d rather she walks that path with fewer advantages."
He sighed.
"Right now, she’s more useful alive than dead."
Cerys’s eyes narrowed.
"That sounds like you’re planning when she stops being useful," she said.
"I plan for many things," he replied.
He leaned back a little and let the tension in his shoulders show for just a heartbeat before he smoothed it away.
Inside, Rodion slid more data into his thoughts.
<Recommendation: mark this room as a future mini-fortified outpost. Guardian-class corpse may be hollowed and repurposed as armour or mobile cover chassis.>
You want me to wear the boss,
he thought.
<Repurposing high-durability materials is efficient,> Rodion answered.
Mikhailis’s lips twitched.
"Future project," he murmured. "Warden-shell heavy unit. Boss corpse bunker."
Serelith’s ears caught the last phrase. Her smile widened.
"You know," she said, "sometimes you sound almost like a proper villain king."
"Only on even days," he answered dryly.
Elowen sighed, but the corner of her mouth betrayed the start of a reluctant smile.
"If you are going to terrify my court," she said, "at least do it with style."
"Always," he said.
He let his gaze drift back to the projection.
The angle shifted again as the ant scouts moved.
Now the view came from higher up, clinging to cracked crystal above the room. From there, Rhaen looked small, a single figure in battered leather standing at the edge of a dark shaft.
Far below that angle, in the stone and tunnels, other minds watched.
The scouts’ senses bled together in the hive-mind.
They felt the fading mana pattern of the Warden, its core gone, its body cooling. They tasted the iron and ichor in the air, marked it as high-nutrient resource. They stored the memory of how the shield-limb moved, how the shockwaves travelled, how the columns cracked.
Trap logic. Movement paths. Weak points.
The soldier unit that had been waiting in the shadows at the room’s far edge shifted its weight.
Mandibles clicked quietly.
It could cross the stone in seconds, climb the plates of the fallen guardian, and reach the human who was now binding her wounds.
It could pierce her throat, or spine, or soft belly.
The urge to harvest flickered through the link – not hunger, exactly, but a recognition of opportunity and risk.
A stronger pulse overrode it.
Wait.
The command hummed through the hive.
The soldier froze.
Higher up the chain, in the Broodmind Chamber far beneath Silvarion’s castle, the Queen’s presence pressed against the pattern like a firm hand.
Not yet.
In the forward camp, the man whose mind was braided with hers sat with one hand relaxed on the table, the other cradling a cold teacup.
Leave the room clear,
Mikhailis thought.
We need the corpse intact and the floor unbroken for later. Let her go deeper if she can. Let her open more doors.
The scouts adjusted.
Their focus widened from Rhaen’s body to the entire chamber.
They traced the grooves, the fall lines of broken crystal, the density of mana near each column base.
The Warden’s corpse was tagged in the shared mental map.
High Nutrient. High Material Value. Shield Pattern Study.
The room itself was marked as Future Outpost.
As the hive’s attention thickened around the fallen boss, something else stirred.
The dungeon’s mana pushed back.
It was not a direct strike.
More like a change in pressure.
The air around the scouts felt heavier, the currents of energy that usually flowed around crystal trunks growing more turbulent and uneven. For a brief second, one of the smaller scouts clinging to a high crack felt its own limbs blur at the edges, as if the dungeon tried to deny its presence.
A collective shiver ran through the link.
The Queen noticed.
So did Rodion.
<Observation: Ashen River’s core is beginning to classify the hive as a distinct intruder type,> the AI noted.
So it’s learning us,
Mikhailis thought.
<Predators usually do,> Rodion answered.
Story of my life,
he replied.
He let his awareness return more fully to the tent.
On the projection, Rhaen had moved back to the edge of the room. She sank down again, this time with her pack in front of her, and began to re-bind the worst of her wounds.
Her motions were automatic now, the efficiency of someone who has done this too often.
As she tightened the fresh bandage around her side, her gaze lingered on one of the scars on the Warden’s plates.
She reached out with the tip of her knife and traced a shallow crescent bite, half-covered by new crystal.
Her eyes narrowed.
She looked at the nearest column, at the faint, almost geometric pattern of tiny cuts climbing one side – cuts that marked where scouts had moved in careful lines.
Rhaen’s lips pressed together.
Her head turned slightly, as if listening.
Silence.
The dungeon hummed. The moss at the edges of the room pulsed faintly with borrowed light.
She remembered, very clearly, every time the hairs on the back of her neck had lifted on the way here. Every time she had stopped and felt a pause in the air, like something else also holding its breath.
The corridors that had felt... cleared.
Not safe, but strangely empty.
Not like untouched dungeon.
"You’re not the only one hunting," she murmured.
Her voice barely carried across the stone, but the scouts closest to her felt the vibration.
"Not League," she went on. "Not Technomancer toys. Not just your usual bite-and-digest crowd."