“Hey Ren.” Lucia says. “Can I talk to you?”

  Ren looks up after wrestling a giant bee monster the size of a horse to the ground and stabbing it with her sword.

  “Sure.” Ren says flatly.

  At Ren’s word, the giant bee monster starts to leap off it’s legs in a bid to buck Ren off it’s back.

  “I know I’m new to adventuring, but I don’t like it when you jump into things suddenly.” Lucia says. “I’m not saying I’m ungrateful, but I really feel like I have no- uhm…”

  Lucia is struggling to find the words to express herself. As she does, Alliot crashes to the ground while burying his elbow into the back of a different giant bee monster.

  “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘agency’. Ren isn’t giving you the agency to make your own choices.” Alliot shouts.

  After speaking his piece, more giant bees begin to swarm Alliot. He violently throws punches to beat them back.

  “Yeah, that’s it!” Lucia says. “I feel like I don’t have any agency.”

  “Ren! Talking things through as a party is also important.” Alliot calls out as he beats back a swarm of bee monsters.

  “Okay.” Ren nods along. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to include you in decision making.”

  “Thanks, Ren.” Lucia says.

  Lucia gives a bright smile. As she does, a giant bee monster dives at her with it’s stinger.

  “Behind and above you. Block it.” Ren says.

  Lucia snaps to attention and looks up. There a giant bee lances out at her. Lucia goes wide eyed and tries to put the shovel she rented the day earlier up and tries to swat at the bee. It’s a crescent-moon shovel, and Lucia has no idea how to use it properly. She can only try to swing the shovel part of the weapon at the bee. Ren’s loose coaching doesn’t help much either. The unnamed drake they kidnapped was sitting on the ground doing absolutely nothing.

  “Use the crescent blade. Use it to catch the stinger.” Ren says.

  Lucia wildly flails at the bee. The bee monster in question stops it’s dive and hovers in place. It waits and watches for Lucia to leave an opening. While not hitting anything, Lucia is threatening space and not presenting an opportunity to safely move in to attack. Ren stands atop a different bee monster and looks at the exchange of furious swings. Ren then pulls a dagger lathered in a poison out of her extra dimensional space and throws it at the bee waiting to strike at Lucia. The bee monster goes down easily enough after the dagger strikes it.

  “You got it.” Ren says.

  Lucia opens her eyes to look at the downed bee monster. Notably, Ren’s dagger is still poking out of the bee’s body.

  “Ren, that’s clearly your knife.” Lucia points out.

  “Lucia, look!” Alliot says holding a much smaller bee monster. “This one is a worker bee! Not a soldier! You can totally take this one on!”

  At those words, Alliot throws the bee monster the size of a dog at Lucia. In a panic, Lucia yelps and bludgeons the bee monster over the head. Despite a blow that should be the great concussion granter, the bee monster gets back up to fly and flit about in the air. Lucia runs around chasing it for a bit. After a few paces, the drake that was kidnapped gets into a crouching position and pounces on the bee monster. The drake wrestles the bee to the ground and Lucia catches up and bashes it with a crescent-moon shovel, an exotic weapon that was for rent. Ren and Alliot watch as Lucia tries her best to defeat an enemy.

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  “I’ll keep an eye on her.” Alliot says. “You should check up on the quest objective.”

  “Okay.” Ren says.

  Ren quickly recovers her dagger from the corpse of a bee monster and rushes off. The majority of Crane Baross’ adventuring guild is in a giant forest where trees grow taller than castle walls. There is a shortage of jobs going toward the older adventuring guild and now adventurers have too much free time. On top of that, they had come across a conspiracy during their adventures and are preparing however they can. That is to say, a little over 40 adventurers took a day trip to a giant forest to fight giant bee monsters the size of horses. While Ren and Lucia are the only ones who took up the quest, everyone else is also there to needlessly risk their lives to help and maybe gather some monster materials for their various ends.

  Ren finds Crane Baross standing in a clearing in this giant forest. He has a massive battle axe in each hand. These axes are typically held in both hands during a fight but Crane, being the muscular man he is, has opted to ignore conventional wisdom and dual wields these massive axes. In front of him is the dwarf Bron Stonearm. He has sent out his animal companion, the raven Borp, to try and negotiate. Above them is Borp and the queen bee of these giant bee monsters. After some time Borp flies back down.

  “So how did it go?” Bron asks.

  “The queen does not like jamming out to the fiddle.” Borp says.

  “What does that mean?” Crane asks.

  “It means that negotiations have failed. She’s not handing over the fruit.” Bron says.

  “Blast.” Crane cusses. “Borp is usually good at this.”

  At those words, the queen bee monster opens it’s maw and a beam of light shoots out from it. Crane, Bron and Brop deftly leap out of the way.

  “We can’t fight that.” Crane says.

  Ren appears at those words and interjects.

  “I can stab the queen.” Ren says.

  “You can stab the queen if she weren’t guarded.” Crane says.

  As though to emphasize his point, warrior bees move in from the queen bee’s flanks in a defensive posture.

  “The entire swarm will die before you can get a clean shot at the queen bee.” Crane says. “On top of that-”

  A bee dives at Crane with it’s stinger. Crane put both of his axes up to catch the stinger and hold it there before he continued speaking.

  “These bees are also suicidal." Crane explains. “And the queen is all too happy to oblige.”

  From above, the queen bee fires another beam of light at Crane. The beam is easily aimed at both him and the warrior bee pressing on the blades of his axes. Crane shoves the bee away with his axes and leaps out of the beam’s path. The beam only manages to catch the warrior bee in the back and pierce through to where Crane was standing only a moment ago.

  “The bees occupy enemies and line up shots for the queen.” Crane says. “With her fire power and suicidal warriors for support, we can’t position ourselves for a clean offense.”

  Ren looks up at the queen bee. The grotesque monster sits on what can loosely be called a throne of beeswax. In truth, it is a hexagonal honeycomb, but it acts like a seat of power all the same. There the queen is surrounded by an overflowing surplus of monstrous honey and the objective of Ren and Lucia’s quest. A wild fruit with a silver type affinity for alchemical purposes. The fruit, along with a few pieces of treasure, are nestled in the honeycomb.

  “There’s nothing we can do.” Crane says. “Fall back. No. Full retreat.”

  The adventurers start to back away. Despite some feeling good and confident in their ability to defeat whole swarms of monsters, they do not fight Crane Baross on his decision. They began a fighting retreat. They would move back while still fighting enemies. They would do this until the bee monsters stop pursing them. Ren took a lot more convincing.

  “I wanna stab it.” Ren says in a dull tone of voice.

  “No.” Bron says.

  “But I wanna stab it.” Ren says with no emotional inflection.

  Bron grabs Ren and hoists her over his shoulder. Then he runs. After everyone put a safe distance from the giant monsters, the head for the treeline and start to take a break from all the fighting. They also take this time to talk about their next steps.

  “So what now? We call this one a bust?” Bron asks.

  “It’s looking like it.” Crane says. “It’s possible to slay them all, but that’s going to take too long and risk too many injuries and maybe even a few deaths.”

  “We came here to help Ren, but it looks like we’ll need to find one of those fruits somewhere else.” Bron says.

  “Ren, we’ll help where we can, but there isn’t much we can do now. We’ll see if we can’t find another alchemy-... fruit thing.”

  “No.” Ren says in her usual tone of voice. “If we can’t beat them, we can steal from them.”

  Crane, Bron, Lucia and every adventurer in earshot gives Ren a confused look.

  “Steal from them?” Crane asks.

  “Yep.” Ren says. “We’re going to steal a key item from a heavily guarded fortress. We’re going to pull off a heist.”

  Alliot taps Ren on the head with a playful empty handed chop. He then points to Lucia.

  “Your party.” Alliot says.

  It takes a moment before Ren asks Lucia for her opinion.

  “Lucia, I am in the midst of forming a plan to pull a heist on this monster beehive.” Ren says. “Can we do it?”

  Lucia thinks for a moment before she responds.

  “I’d like to hear your plan first.” Lucia says.