Reincarnated To Evolve My Bee Empire

But this was promising to be a harder task than I hoped.

The scout Commandos have already sneaked into the castle and brought information about people in it and the layout of the place. Now I discussed it with the war council of Bloodimina, Gresch, and a few other human and bee officers watching from the side in case their advice was needed.

With the Vardish army that attacked earlier reached the castle, its garrison reached approximately 100 thousand people. It was smaller than our numbers, but they had fortifications on their side—a European-style star fort, built to resist enemy fire, although only Vardish people around here had siege-grade firearms.

Dozens of cannons were mounted on castle Soneraht's walls, and besides them were more old-school defenses like cauldrons for boiling water.

I expected the cauldrons, but I actually thought they would be full of oil. But it made sense—water was much cheaper and scalded people just the same!

"We should be especially wary of those, Bloodimina," I pointed out. "Boiling water could strike down many bees at once, and even steam alone can be dangerous."

"We can approach from the sides that don't have cauldrons, Father. Most of their defenses are those cannons and the moat," Bloodimina replied.

The moat brought a lot of concern for Gresch, which he now was talking about with his officers, but bees were naturally not worried. We were worried about other things.

"Tell us again about the pests you mentioned, Commando Totalsilence," I asked the Beehound Commando who brought the combined reports.

"They are countless, Father! I don't think there were so many of them on human crop fields before the crusades went through them… Or so I heard—I wasn't born yet."

"Several teams of scouts were attacked despite being extremely careful. There were rats, gnats, fleas, flies, roaches, black dragons, small brown dragons, gray dragons—dozens of them. Humans and their beasts in the fortress leave their trash in huge pits and everywhere, and the pests seem to thrive on eating them and their food stores. And everything else. The stench there is so strong that it's almost impossible to find anything by scent alone."

I grimaced. Why were these more technologically advanced people so prone to wallowing in their own shit?

"How are they even healthy enough to fight?" I wondered.

"They had a lot of sick people inside, and a lot of dead ones," Totalsilence said. "We couldn't count them because the dead ones were in a pit, and the sick ones aren't resting like bees—they keep working."

"This is unhealthy," Bloodimina muttered. "But this fits with what we've seen earlier with the Vardish soldiers we killed, didn't we? Some of them had traces of sickness. We had to check them carefully to not eat any tainted meat."

I nodded.

"This explains their desire to get hands on the panacea that heals all illnesses. But… is this really *normal* for them?" I waved my hand in the air. "Seriously? Totalsilence, have you heard the people's thoughts about their state?"

"My subordinates listened to them, too. They are used to this, not angry or afraid. So it's 'normal', as you said, Father."

I asked Totalsilence some more questions to clear up the picture, and the more I heard, the more I wanted to just end the suffering of these people one way or another. This was the shittiest (pun intended) place in history!

Despite the rampant illnesses, these humans lived in cramped spaces, with only officers having their separate living quarters. But even officers still shared communal eating spaces. As for cleaning, there didn't seem to be much of it anywhere.

Rats were so rampant (and evolved) that the cats the locals kept near their food stores were losing the war against them. Other insects spread unchecked, slowed down only by aromatic incense that was burned generously around the kitchen and in some other places.

Soldiers, servants and slaves in the fortress all lived amid dirt, and kept working even if illnesses made their chitin break into sores or their entire jaws fall out. They only stopped if they died, which they did often, because the burials looked like a thing that happened almost constantly.

Despite this, there were still plenty of defenders, and they had a leader again—the commandant of Castle Soneraht—who was determined to throw us out of his country.

And while we traveled here, he learned about the last fight Vardish soldiers lost and worked on the dead general's mistakes.

"We've searched for the gunpowder stores in the castle, Father. It was hard, but we found them—the humans put gunpowder in living stone barrels and put them all along the wall. We tried to get into one barrel, but they don't have even tiny cracks! Setting them on fire will be hard."

"Living stone burns, but it takes a while. And if the gunpowder is kept separate, the effect won't be as large as before," Bloodimina said. "We can still assassinate the leader of the fortress."

"If the assassins can fight through all the pests inside it," I pointed out. "Hell, our soldiers will have to fight them while humans fight each other! Beehound Commandos are best in stealth," Totalsilence smiled proudly at this, "and they have their camouflage suits, but the place was hard to navigate even for them."

Bloodimina went deeper in thought.

"And Oracles again don't have anything definite to say about the future except that there will be a fight, but the weather will stay sunny. At least one small boon," she muttered.

'Your Majesty? Your Majesty, may I interrupt your thoughts? Your Majesty, are you heading my call?' an insistent thought knocked into my head.

I blinked and looked up, where Gresch stopped talking aloud and now managed to both look humble and tower over me like only a giant two hundred meters tall could.

'I hear you, Gresch. What did you want?'

'Your Majesty, I apologize if I interrupted you. Both my scouts and yours tell one thing—this is a very well-fortified place, but its defenders are rotting alive in their ignorance of your teachings. I feel like we should consider a prolonged siege!'