She arrived at the campsite fairly quickly thanks to both her ability to fly and the speed at which she was doing so. Despite that, she wasn’t tired. In fact her egg sac had long since regenerated, she felt like she had all the energy in the world and she had been doing some experimenting. With the new powerset at first and then adjusting to her size as her growth began to slow along the journey.

  She thought she’d gotten a decent handle on her transformation by now. The new ability to process so much at once certainly helped. It meant she could spin a web, spit venom, fly and check on the hivemind all at the same time. Not only that, she also had nearly 50 points of view to choose from. Looking at them all at once wasn’t hard but paying attention certainly was, at least in the way her hero training had taught her.

  How do you identify what’s actually a threat when you can smell anything within 2 miles of you, feel every bug that moves in a hundred metres or so and hear even the tiniest rustle of the trees within 300 metres.

  Not to mention her vision. It wasn’t like she just had many eyes all being processed all at once, no that would be too easy. Instead, they were all different. Heat vision, motion detection and monochrome vision saw the furthest. Followed by her 360 degree vision. A single eye with 360 degree vision. Then there was the more detail oriented stuff, good enough to 300 metres. Small compared to her size but absurd compared to normal human vision.

  It was all insane and a lot to keep track of.

  She wasn’t exactly in the right state of mind to appreciate it either. Her journey had been anything but peaceful. Not only was she followed by one of the Dukes, his presence constantly at the back of her mind due to her new senses, she was also constantly skirting around villain territories she didn’t even know existed.

  Who set up shop on a telephone pole? Even if it stopped working, Aria could feel the electricity still running through the ground. They could be fried at any moment.

  Unfortunately she didn’t have the time to warn them or any method they’d actually understand. They were villains. Their fates shouldn’t matter to her, or at least most people wouldn’t have cared but Aria always thought people were a little too quick to dismiss villains.

  Nevertheless, she was busy so she moved on. The rest of the journey was filled with similar annoyances unfortunately and looking at her destination now, she wasn’t sure it was worth it.

  Once, this place had been a nice row of homes, the one place near London where you could actually touch grass. All outside what would become your front door for the majority of the trip.

  Now shattered homes lay before her.

  Crumbled either due to battle or decay, the holiday homes she had once spent time in were shells of their former selves. The grass she had once rolled in was overgrown. Or dead.

  Where once she had looked out of her window and seen nature at its most beautiful, she instead saw the corpse of a bird with its head in a plastic bag. Tattered, rain soaked brochures littered the ground. Depictions of what the place had once been only splodges on paper now, incoherent colours blending together so thoroughly they didn’t have any meaning.

  The caravans she remembered seeing were gone, rings of dead grass all they left in their wake. It never seemed to recover from the damage they caused.

  At least the playpark was mostly intact. Those things seemed to survive anything, always alone in their ability to handle the rough conditions. It almost seemed lonely. Aria remembered trying to hold herself on those monkey bars, as she kept falling and falling. Her dad would tell her to get back up every time and she would. Until she got sick of it. Aria just decided to use her wings to help support her bodyweight and she’d showed it off to her father.

  He’d scolded her, in between fits of giggles.

  Aria imagined letting her swarm populate it. They’d probably cheat as she did. The idea amused her, the drones really were like children and they fit the playpark surprisingly well in her mind. In fact, some of them were expressing interest right this moment.

  She sent a mental ‘simmer down’ throughout the hivemind, this wasn’t their nest just yet. When it was, then they could have the playpark.

  She looked around, seeing if there was anywhere she could plop herself down that had enough space for her current size. She figured she was maximum size by now. It was hard to quantify and even harder to instinctually estimate but if you could fit a couple football stadiums somewhere she could probably fit too. Right now, Aria was making a guesstimate by using the shadow she cast across most of the campsite.

  She’d heard that other calamities were actually a lot bigger than her.

  Titus fit his namesake, the eastern dragon was long enough to encircle the entirety of his home city Shanghai and wide enough to block out the sky. Juggernaut’s wingspan was said to be wide enough cover several small towns. Carbon was a little tricky but he mostly appeared about the size of a small asteroid. Eternal and Mannequin meanwhile were more around her size, though no one had seen them long enough to actually estimate it.

  All that to say finding anywhere with enough space to house her would be challenging. Thankfully, she had chosen this place for that very reason.

  Looking to the centre of the campsite, she found what she was looking for. A space completely wide open. Once, Aria had put up a tent in this field. Now, she was going to be stringing up webs in a remarkably similar arrangement for her nest.

  She carefully stepped over the buildings, making sure not to damage them any further. Once she made it to the clearing, she was just about to set herself down when she sensed something.

  She threw herself back into the air.

  BOOM!

  The sound range from beneath her as the one area of this campsite big enough to hold her exploded into a shower of mud, dirt and what looked like fragments of bone.

  The field was wrecked. Emerging from the several epicentres that caused these exposions were people in uniform. Some wore the typical outfits of Noblesse. The capes ranging from silver to deep blue, suggesting they were all Baron rank or below. Aria wouldn’t have been too worried, if they would just stop coming.

  More and more emerged from these holes in the ground, like ants scuttling about her feet. It wasn’t just heroes either. Others wore suits and Aria’s new vision let her see the emblem emblazoned on their lapells. A queen chess piece, painted black and wearing a combat dress.

  ‘Black Queen’s people?’ She groaned to herself. Aria had hoped they’d abandoned the place by now but of course with the week she’d had, she wouldn’t be that lucky.

  They all surrounded her and began charging weapons, powers and all sorts of offensive materials. Aria was sick of this. She let out a chittering screech of frustration into the night air, only now realising how dark it had gotten. ‘Can’t I have a moment’s peace to THINK!’

  It seemed to disorient everyone present, clothes billowing in the wind she had generated and many holding their hands to their ears. Aria used that moment to even the odds. She released her reformed egg sac, the Hivemind buzzing with exileration as she relied on them once more. It almost seemed like they would fight for the bodies.

  Aria thought she could simply create new consciousnesses to inhabit them or pick from those that currently existed. She didn’t though. Instead, they seemed to sort themselves out and whatever bodies were left empty gained a new inhabitant.

  The Noblesse were nearly done recovering from her screech but the Black Queen’s people were already reacting. Muzzles flashed and bullets fired, straight into the newly born drones. Aria’s eyes widened and she chittered, lowering her body to take the hits on her own carapace. The drones might be squashed by it but they bounced off her harmlessly.

  Some however managed to make it through and a few drones were hit. She felt a few return to the Hivemind immediately.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  She re-evaluated whether it was a good idea to spawn them in the first place. Having to protect them like this would just make her an easy target. The Hivemind sensed her fears. They chittered from beneath her carapace and she felt their strategy.

  Reluctantly, she raised her form.

  Then with a mental war cry, the drones charged at the people with guns.

  The hivemind was a chaotic mess of shouts as the fliers arrived first. Amateurish swings and flailing limbs battering the general direction of their opponents. Some even mixed up their nerve signals, accidentally using their wings instead.

  No strategy, they were barely keeping individual coordination let alone cohesion as a group.

  Aria winced. Though uncoordinated they did some damage at least.

  Next came the quadrapeds. Nimble on their four feet, they should have darted around the legs of their opponents. Instead they just dogpiled. Drones threw themselves at their opponents, tackling them to the ground and letting their stingers do most of the work.

  The Black Queen’s forces were a coordinated group of trained soldiers with almost superhuman abilities. Her drones were a disorganised chaotic mess of monstrous creatures.

  ‘I got this one!’ She heard one of the drones shout in the hivemind as another just turned away and seemed a little lost. It wasn’t the only one. The drones didn’t know what to do, they’d never fought before and they were born literal days ago.

  In the future she’d have to go over strategy with the hivemind.

  Gun might lose to stinger but bullet beat carapace every time and for now Aria had to just watch. The Noblesse wouldn’t sit idly by forever.

  They had seen the Hive drones but were slower to react. Instead, they had been firing off their powers blindly, allowing Aria to memorise some of their abilities.

  Most people who gained abilities did so from the collective unconscious, the beliefs that were widely held and embodied best by a few individuals. The more widespread a belief, the more people received that power. So for example, a pretty common power was the ability to have strong bones by drinking milk. Not inhumanly so, usually, but definitely the best you could get with their body type.

  Heck, she’d seen a kid who could become a cat because who doesn’t pretend they’re an animal at least once when they’re a child?

  Because of that, it was usually pretty easy to tell where a group of heroes came from based on their abilities. A lot of them would have the same belief and thus the same power.

  This group was pretty obvious, even to Aria. The red phone boxes that appeared all around the battlefield gave her a clue. The fact that when people stepped into them they disappeared reminded her of a particular myth.

  Aria looked up and sure enough stones were starting to hammer down on her.

  She couldn’t let them hit the drones and they weren’t really doing much to her so she decided to just let them hit her. They bounced off her carapace, doing very little at all. She honestly wondered what they expected a few pebbles to do to something of her size, she didn’t think the other calamities were undestimated so.

  She was right, they weren’t underestimating her either.

  When the next rock hit her carapace, she thought nothing of it. Then she felt a sharp, stinging pain from that area. Turning to look with one of her eyes, she saw that one of the heroes had swapped places with the rock on her back and had started drilling with something made of bone. Her carapace was fine for now but it still stung. Then she felt another stinging pain and looked over.

  More heroes were appearing on her carapace. All of them were using their various abilities to cause as much damage to any single area of her carapace as they could. She shook herself as best she could but they clung like gnats.

  She’d not really noticed how difficult it was for an arcachnoid to access their back or abdomen from above until now. She couldn’t even roll over to squish them. Ugh! Why didn’t she have a convenient hero swatter when she needed one?

  Aria would have to get creative.

  She flared the fan that normally covered her wings when they were stored and as they all looked up to see what she was going to do, she let the light shine. Directly into their eyes. Screams rang out and some stopped what they were doing, stumbling about in their new blindness. Unfortunately some were better trained than that. They continued digging into her carapace even though they couldn’t see what they were doing. Thankfully this was only a temporary measure.

  Aria knew this wouldn’t be enough to stop them. It would however make them easy targets. Unlike normal arachnids, Aria had a set of 9 tails made of pure muscle that could reach onto her back and swat any annoying flies away.

  Her tails began sweeping her back, knocking most of the heroes off even with whatever they’d done to attach themselves.

  Though most of them landed fairly comfortably thanks to the gravity manipulator among them, there were some who weren’t caught in time. These were the more sturdy of their group though and they survived the fall just fine, if a little bruised.

  It gave her time to think. Aria needed to get rid of the heroes or at least keep them busy long enough she could help the swarm. Maybe if the Black Queen started losing people she’d retreat.

  Who was Aria kidding, this was a villain she was talking about. Disposable minions were their whole thing.

  Plus, sweeping them away like bugs didn’t seem to break the heroes’ spirits. It was admirable on one han- uh, appendage, infuriating on another.

  Instead they would just line up next to the Noblesse who were presumably making the rock rain and every time it fell Aria could feel yet another group of Noblesse land on her back. It was annoying and more crucially distracting. Enough so that she only saw the team of 5 emerge from the ground but didn’t really register it.

  Too busy sweeping the annoying Noblesse off her back and thinking about how she could help her drones, she failed to realise when all 5 approached underneath her.

  Before she knew it there was pain.

  Finally paying attention, Aria realised that the five people underneath her had worked together to launch a powerful strike with weapons in their hands. Each one looked like a flaming image of a weapon, more than anything substantial.

  The heroes and weapons were all distinct.

  The first was a middle aged man dressed in what appears to be a set of monk robes, the royal purple cape marking him as a Count looking oddly mismatched with his dark brown robes. He carried no weapons in the sash around his waist. Despite that for some reason there was a flaming cudgel in his hand, ethereal and releasing embers that felt scorching against her carapace.

  His face was rugged, the beard of a redneck adorning a plain slightly wrinkled face. Upon which wasn’t the smile Aria had seen on most of the Noblesse she encountered. He was focussed, ready for a fight.

  Aria hereby dubbed him Redneck.

  The second was a young girl, likely the same age as Aria herself. She wore an orange feather coat, streaked with black. It was the same colour as her hair. Like the others, she carried a weapon in her hand, this time flaking with ash rather than embers. It was a dagger, the metal slightly out of shape as though crafted by an amateur.

  Nervous eyes scanned Aria’s frame but the fists clenched around the dagger currently trying to pierce her underside showed her determination. Aria imagined one day this could’ve been her friend. A fellow up and coming hero, ready to protect the commoners together. That determination would have been something Aria strived to imitate.

  Maybe she’d looked like that once upon a time? When she was still human. Might as well accept that wasn’t the case any more.

  Because now she realised that determination also meant they’d never be friends. All because of this monstrous transformation. How was that fair?

  If they were heroes together, Aria felt like she would’ve been called Girlboss or maybe Chicken courage? Scared but determined, as all heroes should be. Aria could just imagine someone giving her a nickname, it’d probably be something like skittish.

  The third was an old woman covered in a black cloak from head to toe. Only Aria’s superior vision allowed her to see under the hood to the wrinkles beneath. She had a flaming staff in her hand, a magical bauble stuck onto it’s tip like an afterthought trying to smash the carapace she was bashing at. Her cape was crimson red and stood out starkly against the dark black of her outfit.

  She was grinning at the carapace she was attacking, laser focused on a single point as though her life depended on it.

  Stop staring Old Bat

  Fourth was a woman in a mourner’s dress. Crimson cape looking even more out of place than on the monk and even worse was the flaming sock in her hand. It looked like there was something in it too. The weapon sort of reminded Aria of those that were used in prison riots when there weren’t any better tools available.

  Her expression was the most strange of them all. She looked bored, emotionless, just done with everything. It was… kinda creepy.

  She’ll be Mourner.

  Finally there was the man those weapons seemed to come from. He wore a biker coat, a backpack glowing with the same fire as the weapons. In his hand he held several. A baseball bat took up one hand while the other had throwing knives in each finger. Then there was the rest of him. Small blades protruded from his feet, much larger spikes were poking out from his shoulders and on his belt was a variety of weapons. These ones weren’t lit on fire at least. Axes, daggers, kunai and even sais. It was a bit of an eclectic mix but strangely it fit the man.

  He too wore a crimson cape, the sign of a count ranked hero. Obviously the supplier of the weapons. Maybe something edgy like Vengeance? Yeah, it’s just a temporary name anyway.

  Unfortunately Aria wasn’t familiar with Birmingham’s mid ranked heroes, only Marquis and above. Even that was only because she knew all the notable heroes in England.

  It looked like she was about to get far too intimately acquiainted with at least 5 of them.

  They were currently trying to stab through her underside carapace.

  Yet she felt… Underwhelmed. This was a whole team of heroes and the best they could do were some chips to her underside. She was just about to blast them with webbing when things changed.

  She felt the hivemind buzz with alarm.

  She had underestimated them again…

  They would punish her for that.

  first impression