My Fusion System: Fusing Weak Soldiers with Direwolves at the Start-Chapter 64: Giant Beekeepers

Kaelor turned to look at Titan. The great beast towered over men and horses alike, its bulk a mountain of power and muscle wrapped in dark, jagged plates of metallic armour.

Each segment of its hide shimmered with a deep obsidian hue, pulsing faintly like embers under the surface. Its plated chest rose and fell slowly with each breath, exhaling steam from nostrils that flared like a furnace.

Even without the additional armour fitted by the system, Titan Cebereus was a fortress on four legs. Its natural hide alone could turn aside silver ranked swords, and he had seen it catching ballista bolts in its maw and crushing the bolt like kindling.

Titan was bred for war, for sieges, for trampling through enemy lines, but even with all its monstrous might, Kaelor’s heart faltered as he gazed at the distant black clouds. Bees. Not dozens, tens of thousands. A living storm of buzzing wings and stingers, pouring out from the distant hive like a curse.

No beast could fight that. No matter how tough. Maybe it could survive a hundred. A thousand at most. But that?

Still, Kaelor returned later with reinforcements, ten more Guardsmen, Vi at his side, and ten volunteers from the town: seven women and three men. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

They gathered on the edge, just before the flower field, where the air was faintly sweet with nectar and danger.

These were not ordinary townsfolk. They had all stepped forward willingly, despite Kaelor’s warnings and spoken consequences. Once fused, they might never be fully human again. Their limbs might change, their senses alter, a great shift, but the reward outweighed the fear. Two silver coins would be given monthly from next year, paid directly from Kaelor’s treasury. A fortune to any peasant. Enough to buy a new life. Enough to dream of lands, livestock, and a home with stone walls if they worked long enough.

"Go ahead," Kaelor said, nodding to Vi.

Vi stepped forward, her eyes focused and resolute. In her left hand, she held the Diamond-ranked Focus Crystal, pulsing with a gentle blue glow like the still heart of a storm. Her right hand stretched forth into the open air. For a moment, there was silence.

A faint whisper of pressure gathered at her fingertips and swirled into existence, forming a twisting spiral of wind and force. A cyclone bloomed from nothing, spinning rapidly and howling like a hungry spirit. It surged into the swarm, slicing through the air with precision, catching hundreds of bees in its pull. The vortex dipped low and swept in an arc, carrying its catch back to their side.

As the cyclone dissipated, the bees fell in a flurry, hundreds of them twitching and buzzing feebly on the ground.

Without hesitation, Vi extended her hand again, summoning a second cyclone. This time, as it took shape, she whispered an arcane word. The spell shimmered and split. Two cyclones spun in opposite spirals, slicing a path through the air. The bees panicked, scattering in all directions. Many tried to flee back to the hive, but hundreds more were snared in the magic, sucked into the twin vortexes like leaves in a storm drain.

When both cyclones whirled back to their side and dispersed, leaving behind another writhing mass of stunned bees, Kaelor’s lips curled faintly.

"Count them," he commanded, pointing at the Guardsmen.

The twenty men sprang into action, each drawing daggers and moving swiftly across the field, separating the bees with practiced care. In short order, they had arranged ten neat heaps, each with exactly one hundred bees. The piles shimmered faintly in the sunlight, tiny wings twitching, some still buzzing weakly.

"System, fuse."

[30 FP for each. 300 FP deducted!]

Blue flames engulfed the heaps and the town folks, lifting them into the air and colliding them in a bright blue burst. Kaelor has seven hundred fusion points, with three hundred deducted, it fell to four hundred.

When the blue flames died out, it revealed ten figures with wings, gossamer-thin and translucent like stained glass kissed by sunlight, pulsing with golden shimmer as they vibrated in short, rapid bursts, filling the air with a soft, thrumming hum.

Two antennas protruding from their foreheads and from thigh to ankle, they shimmered with a dense, chitinous coating, dark like burnished amber but with subtle golden hues that caught the light, resembling the protective armor of a queen bee. The surface wasn’t just smooth, it had faint, velvet-like fuzz in places, softening the deadly grace with a deceptive warmth.

Their upper thighs remained human, supple and golden, but gradually gave way to the hardened segments below, as though nature itself had woven the hive into their form. Their calves were powerful, built like the hind legs of a bee ready for flight, ending in arched, pointed feet that looked almost like stingers poised to strike.

[You have successfully created a Giant Beekeeper. A mesmerized fusion of man and giant honeybee, with command over honeybees. Though they appear strong, it is a deceptive trait to scare predators, their scales aren’t as tough as they look.]

They approached the bees with deliberate caution, each step slow and measured, the dry grass crunching faintly beneath their feet. Vi stayed slightly behind the front line, her fingers twitching with latent arcane energy, ready to cast a spell at the first sign of aggression. The air buzzed thickly with tension and the hum of wings, the sound vibrating in their bones like a warning bell.

But when they came close enough to see the shimmer of translucent wings and the golden fuzz coating the bees’ large bodies, something unexpected happened. The swarm did not attack. No frantic swirls, no sharp stings of alarm. Instead, the bees hovered calmly in midair, as if suspended by invisible threads of magic. Their bodies pulsed with a soft glow, and a few even floated in slow spirals toward the hive, pausing as if waiting for the Beekeepers to follow.

It wasn’t hostility they radiated, it was something stranger. An eerie stillness, almost a beckoning. The hive pulsed in rhythm with the swarm, its surface glimmering like molten amber, and for a moment, it seemed to breathe.

The town folks glanced at one another, uncertain, but not a single bee made a move to harm them. They had accepted their keepers!