CHAPTER 483: NIGHT BATTLES

It was a sleepless night for me...

As was any other night since I developed a sleepless gene. But THIS night was also very stressful!

Even when all my Advisers and my wife went to sleep, I monitored the situation near the frozen forest, issuing commands where necessary and directing the flow of people and supplies...

I did so much microcontrolling that I felt like a competitive RTS player!

Right after the sunset, the tensions were at their highest. The seeds didn’t stop flying, but even with the radars and sources of light, my people needed time to adapt to catching them in the dark.

Worse, the dragons needed to sleep as much as their riders! Most of them went to sleep, and we had comparatively few nocturnal dragons to replace them in catching the ice-hole tree seeds.

Some of these dragons were of the owl species, while others were bats—the Empire’s beast-talkers tamed everything that would let itself be tamed.

(Bat-dragons looked more like bugs than dragons, and were covered in sparse fur instead of scales, but my girls called them dragons because they were fliers and it caught on.)

The lack of discrimination in taming worked to our advantage this time. Bats could find their targets even in perfect darkness using echolocation, and their riders directed their bats to hunt the most slippery seeds.

Besides radars and night dragons, we also had many Beehounds and Hardbees with heat vision, who could easily see flying seeds in the dark thanks to their chill. However, these bees could only direct humans to wave their nets.

Many mechas also had crews of Hardbees and thus could move even at night, but they were less agile than humans and had a hard time holding nets with their manipulators.

Overall, our air defences still suffered with the onset of the night, and suffered greatly.

In the first hour of darkness, I got reports about hundreds of seeds flying past the night shifts of the emergency workers and landing somewhere in the Empire!

Of course, most of them were immediately destroyed by the same night-working Hardbees or ordinary patrols that reported them. The freezing aura of the ice-hole tree seeds was so weak that even a bee could smash the seed before she got hypothermia. Especially if it had a few sisters nearby.

But worse than these were seeds that weren’t reported! Because they weren’t found, and they would have the entire night to grow.

Extra teams of scouts with heat vision flew all over the territories near the mountains, searching for fallen seeds. But again, most of the Empire’s scouts were currently sleeping and gathering strength to get up early tomorrow.

After the first hour, though, the crisis eased up. Without the sun to warm them up and to create the hot-cold air difference, the trees in the frozen forest grew new flowers more slowly than before. The wind weakened, too.

As a result, the amount of seeds flying into the Bee Empire decreased. Although some of them still slipped, there were a lot fewer of them this time. Some of the teams catching these slippery seeds even had spare time to search for the seeds that went past the cordons earlier!

The deeper into the night, the colder the frozen forest’s surroundings became, and the easier it was on my people. By morning, I began to hope that the night didn’t go too badly!

Then the sunlight hit, and my scouts could finally search for the farthest seeds, while I could calculate the total results of our work over the night.

It was only slightly better than I predicted!

Hundreds of trees had time to grow to the height of houses all around the foot of the mountains. Human woodcutters, who had already woken up for a new day of work, hurried to deal with them.

Too late—these trees have already removed the 1% of our yesterday’s progress in eliminating the frozen forest!

"If this continues every night, our war will be at a standstill forever," I told Workharder, Bloodhero and Researchina that morning.

We were all in the Hive Supremo again, gathered for a partial Empire Council. All three of my girls had bags under their eyes this morning and yawned from time to time (except Bloodhero, who wanted to yawn but suppressed it).

"Also, I told you to rest tonight," I added, looking at this state. "Bees aren’t made for pulling all-nighters! Unless they have a gene for it. This was why I took control of the tree situation tonight!"

"I’m fine, Father!" Workharder protested immediately. "And the things I did were more important than some sleep. Right, Bloodhero?"

Bloodhero nodded curtly.

"This is a war, as you said. As the one who deals with wars, I realised that we need more people to break the standstill. We didn’t distract you at night with this, but I and Workharder have prepared plans for pulling more people toward the avalanche site, taking away from nearby garrisons who have a surplus in supplies and manpower."

I frowned, but took the stack of papers she passed to me. They were covered in schemes and scribbles that I swiftly deciphered with my experience and expertise in my girls’ approach to bureaucracy and spelling.

Bloodhero and Workharder’s plan will let us reinforce the defences against the trees before this nightfall, but at the cost of the border defences in the area. However, our borders haven’t been attacked a lot lately, so smaller garrisons should be enough.

Probably.

"I approve this—if the Oracles don’t say that these garrisons will be attacked this week. They have woken up, too—ask them."

Bloodhero saluted sharply. Workharder just nodded.

"Yes, Father!"

"Father, I have a proposal as well," Researchina said a moment later. "You asked me to search for poisons that could be used against the ice-hole trees. This search didn’t succeed yet, but I discovered something else."

She passed me her project’s plan. As soon as I read the first page, my eyes widened.

"This... do you realise how risky this is?!.."