Chapter 4: The Hornet's Lesson
Kai Shen nearly died on the eleventh day.
Not from anything that outclassed him by an order of magnitude.
Not from a trap he could not have seen.
He nearly died because he was overconfident.
And overconfidence, in this world, was just a slower way to die.
He had spent the two days after the cricket building his skills.
Smaller prey to fill in his stat gaps. Practice runs with Jump Burst he had discovered it had power but no steering, and if his target moved during the burst he would sail straight past it.
He was working on chaining it with his initial positioning to fix the problem.
He had gotten, perhaps, a little comfortable.
He found the hornet feeding alone on a split piece of fallen fruit.
Vespa species. Two centimetres of yellow-and-black body. The larger kind, not the social wasp variety this was the kind that hunted other insects, armed with venom designed to incapacitate prey several times its own size.
Kai ran the numbers and estimated they were roughly equal in raw stats.
"Roughly equal. I can take it."
He had thought that was enough.
He approached perfectly. Stillness active. Camouflage shifted toward the fruit skin's orange-brown. Timing aligned to arrive as the hornet's head angled down in feeding.
The ambush landed.
His forelegs closed on the hornet's thorax from above precisely as they had closed on the cricket.
Then the hornet stung him.
Not a panicked flail. A deliberate, precise drive of the stinger between his foreleg segments at the one gap in his natural armour.
The hornet had done this before. Or its species had, over millions of years of being hunted by exactly what Kai Shen currently was.
The venom hit like fire spreading through wiring.
His grip loosened.
The hornet wrenched free.
What followed was not a fight.
It was a scramble.
The hornet came back around, stinger leading, and Kai vision shuddering at the edges activated Jump Burst on pure reflex and threw himself sideways off the fruit.
He hit bark. Skidded. Caught himself with three legs and one foreleg.
Froze.
Stillness. Camouflage. Full suppression.
The hornet circled twice.
It could not find him.
It returned to the fruit.
Kai did not move for forty minutes.
The venom worked through his system. The twitching in his left foreleg faded slowly, by degrees.
He was alive. Technically.
His left foreleg had lost perhaps a third of its responsiveness.
And the hornet was still there, six centimetres away, utterly unbothered.
He spent those forty minutes replaying the fight in his mind.
Every moment. Every decision point.
He found four separate moments where he could have ended it cleanly.
He had missed all four because he had used the cricket as his mental model a powerful but ultimately simple opponent and had not adjusted for something that could think back.
"That," he admitted to himself, "was very stupid of me."
The hornet finished feeding and flew away.
Kai filed the failure under lessons learned and began thinking about how to kill a hornet.
He spent two full days working out the problem.
The weakness in his ambush-from-above approach was simple: it left the prey's abdomen free.
On the cricket, that hadn't mattered. On a hornet, it was the difference between a clean kill and a stinger through his armour.
He needed to control the abdomen.
That meant attacking from a different angle.
On the thirteenth day, he found another lone hornet feeding at a sap wound in a pine trunk.
This time, he did not approach from above.
He came from the side, slightly behind the wing root, angled so that when his forelegs closed, the right foreleg caught the thorax and the left swept across the abdomen
Pinning the stinger against the hornet's own body mass before it could extend.
The approach took twenty-two minutes.
The strike took a tenth of a second.
The hornet did not sting him.
Warmth surged through Kai's body.
Strength +5
Speed +4
Agility +3
Perception +2
Devour Power: +12
[Ability extracted: Venom Resistance I (passive: arthropod venom effects reduced by 40%)]
[Ability extracted: Precision Strike (active: target a specific weak point, next attack deals 2x damage to that location)]
Two extractions from one prey.
He had never gotten two before.
"Brother Hornet," Kai thought, "you taught me the most valuable lesson so far. It would be rude not to take everything you had."
Venom Resistance settled into his biology like armour being fitted.
The ghost-ache in his left foreleg still lingering from the first encounter faded noticeably.
But Precision Strike interested him more.
It required thought. Deliberate identification of the weak point. A conscious commitment before the attack.
It was not the tool of a creature that hunted on instinct.
It was the tool of something that hunted with its mind.
Which, Kai reflected, was exactly what he was.
He went looking for a third hornet.