Two years earlier, the underpass beneath the Shibuya rail line had smelled of piss and cigarette ash.
Atsushi remembered that smell more than anything else. The way it hung thick in the concrete tunnel while six older boys circled him with pipes and knuckles. He'd walked into their territory on purpose. Someone had said the Nishiyama crew talked shit about him behind his back, and Atsushi couldn't let that stand. Not then. Not ever.
"You're the loudmouth from that rich kid school." Their leader tossed a length of pipe from hand to hand. A big bastard with a shaved head and a scar splitting his eyebrow. "Talking about how tough you are. How you'd wreck anyone who crossed you."
"I would." Atsushi spat on the ground between them. "Come find out."
They came. All six at once.
The first pipe caught him across the shoulder and dropped him to one knee. The second cracked into his ribs. He swung wild, connected with someone's jaw, felt teeth give under his knuckles. Then a boot slammed into his stomach and folded him in half, the air leaving his lungs in a wet gasp.
He'd been stupid. He knew it even as they beat him. Six against one. No backup. No plan. Just ego and rage carrying him into a fight he couldn't win.
Then a body dropped from the concrete stairs above.
Atsushi didn't see the boy land. He heard it. The wet crunch of a knee driving into someone's spine, followed by a scream. When he looked up through the blood in his eyes, a blonde stranger with an undercut was standing over one of the Nishiyama boys, fist rising and falling like a piston.
"Two on six." The blonde's voice was calm. Almost bored. "Better odds than one."
"Who the fuck are you?"
"Someone who hates these assholes more than you do." He ducked a pipe swing, caught the arm, and snapped his elbow across the wrist. Something cracked. The boy holding the pipe dropped it, screaming, cradling his ruined hand against his chest. "Get up. Fight or die. Those are the options."
Atsushi got up.
They fought back to back in that stinking underpass, two bloodied teenagers against six. Atsushi took a pipe to the temple that opened his scalp and painted his face red. The blonde caught a knife across his forearm, deep enough to show white before it welled crimson. But they kept swinging. Kept dropping bodies. The Nishiyama crew hadn't expected resistance. They'd expected an easy beating, a lesson taught to a loudmouth. What they got was two demons who wouldn't stay down.
The scarred leader broke first. He grabbed his crippled friends and ran, leaving the underpass echoing with their retreating footsteps.
Atsushi collapsed against the concrete wall. His whole body screamed. Every breath sent knives through his cracked ribs, and the blood from his scalp kept running into his eyes no matter how many times he wiped it away.
Beside him, the blonde slid down the wall and sat in the filth, cradling his sliced forearm. Blood dripped from his fingertips onto the concrete, pooling dark in the dim light.
"You're insane." Atsushi laughed, though it hurt like hell to do it. "You just dropped in on six guys for someone you don't even know."
"Saw you take the first hit." The blonde tilted his head back against the wall, black eyes half-closed. "You didn't run." He spit out a glob of blood. "Most people run. It seems like you were to stupid to." He turned his head, studying Atsushi through the gloom. "I respect that."
"Akira Satō." He held out his good hand.
"Atsushi Kamijo." He took it. Their palms were both slick with blood, and the grip left red smeared across both their wrists. "You always show up when people are getting their ass kicked?"
"Heh." Akira wiped his mouth with the back of his ruined arm. "Do you always go looking to get your ass kick?"
They sat there a long time, bleeding, breathing, the trains rumbling overhead. Neither of them moved to leave. Neither wanted to. Something had settled between them in that filthy tunnel, forged in split knuckles and shared pain.
"Its weird. Usually its just me standing after a fight." Atsushi's voice came out quieter than he meant it to. He hated how it sounded. But the words kept coming anyway. "Most times I have to watch my own back for some son of a bitch looking for a cheap shot."
Akira didn't answer right away. He pressed his hand against the wound on his arm, staunching the flow, and stared at the graffiti covering the opposite wall.
"Then how about we watch each other's back." He said it like a fact. Like something already decided. "You take a hit, I'm there. I take a hit, you're there. No matter what. No matter who."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that." Akira turned those black eyes on him again. There was no doubt in them. No hesitation. "You hear me? I'll always have your back. And you'll have mine."
Atsushi looked away, stared at the blood pooling between his boots so Akira wouldn't see his face.
"Yeah." His voice barely worked. "Always. I swear it."
They made it out of that underpass leaning on each other, two broken kids holding each other upright, laughing through split lips at how badly they'd both been beaten. The silver ear piercing came a week later, when Akira had shown up at his door with the needle and the stud, saying every crew needed a mark.
Atsushi hadn't been alone since.
Not until the plane fell out of the sky.
Now he crashed through the jungle, branches whipping his face, the hand axe slick in his grip, and the only thought in his skull was that promise made in blood and piss and concrete.
Always. He'd sworn it. Always.
Above him, the wasp carried Akira higher into the canopy, and Atsushi ran until his lungs burned.
"Put him down!" Atsushi's voice tore raw from his throat. "You winged bitch, I'll rip those fucking wings off and shove them down your throat! Let him go!"
The wasp woman drifted lazily through the shafts of green light spilling through the canopy, unbothered by the screaming man below her. Her body gleamed with a slick chitinous sheen, black and yellow bands wrapping a waist so narrow Atsushi could've circled it with his hands, flaring out into hips that rolled with every beat of her wings. Two heavy breasts hung swollen against Akira's slack back, the nipples stiff and dark, dragging across his shoulder blades as she adjusted her grip. Her secondary arms slithered out from beneath her ribs and traced down Akira's stomach, palms flat against the muscle, fingers dipping lower.
"Don't touch him! DON'T YOU FUCKING TOUCH HIM!"
She glanced down. Her compound eyes caught the light, refracting a dozen tiny copies of the furious boy sprinting through the undergrowth beneath her. Whatever she made of his noise, it wasn't fear.
"So loud." Her voice buzzed at the edges, layered like two throats speaking at once. One slender hand slid over Akira's chest, thumb circling his nipple while another dropped to cup between his thighs, kneading the limp bulge in his slacks with slow, deliberate pressure. "But you waste your breath, little thing. I cannot hear the meat squawking on the ground."
Akira's head lolled against her collarbone, eyes glazed and half-lidded, venom pumping through him. His body wouldn't answer him. But the flush crawling up his neck said something else had woken.
"I have already claimed this one." Her tail curled up between Akira's legs, the segmented tip pressing against him, grinding. "See how his body knows it? He fights the poison and still he swells for me. Such a sweet mate." She lowered her face to the crook of Akira's neck and dragged her tongue up the length of it, tasting the sweat there, humming low in her chest. Her secondary hands never stopped moving, one pinching his nipple until his paralyzed body twitched, the other working the front of his slacks open with practiced fingers.
Atsushi saw her hand slip inside. Saw the way she gripped what she found and pulled it free into the humid air, stroking Akira's cock in a fist while her tail pressed and rubbed beneath.
Something in Atsushi's skull went white.
"I'LL KILL YOU!" He didn't recognize his own voice anymore. It came out as an animal thing, a shriek ripped from somewhere below thought. His legs pumped harder, boots tearing through rotted leaves and tangled roots, the hand axe raised over his head like it could reach forty feet into the air. "GET YOUR HANDS OFF HIM! YOU WHORE!"
The wasp woman tilted her head, watching the frenzy below her with something like amusement flickering across her inhuman face. She stroked Akira faster, deliberate now, her thumb circling the flushed head while her tongue lapped along his jaw.
"Mmm. This one has a friend who wants him badly." Her buzzing voice dipped, thick with feeding pleasure. "I understand the hunger. He is a fine mate." Her tail squeezed. Akira's hips gave a helpless little jerk, betraying him. "But I am full now, little screamer. One mate is enough for my burrow."
She rose higher, wings beating faster, and the movement stretched the distance between them. Atsushi's chest heaved. His eyes burned. He couldn't breathe past the rage clawing up his throat.
"COME BACK HERE!"
"Do not despair." She looked down at him one final time, and Atsushi swore he saw teeth in that alien mouth. "I have sisters. Many sisters, and they are hungry too. One of them will want you. You have such fire in you." She dragged her tongue over Akira's throat one last time, savoring. "Follow, if you can keep up. They will be glad of the meat."
Then she banked hard between two great trunks and vanished into the deeper green, Akira's blonde head disappearing last of all, his body limp and used in her grip.
Atsushi ran into the space where she'd been. Empty air. Broken branches drifting down. The distant thrum of wings fading north.
"NO!" He swung the axe at nothing, at a tree, at the ground, chips of bark exploding around him. "AKIRA! AKIRA, I'M COMING! I SWEAR IT! I FUCKING SWEAR IT!"
He plunged forward again, chasing the sound, chasing a ghost, tears cutting clean lines through the grime on his face.
"Atsushi, wait!" Ayumi's voice cracked behind him. "You can't just run blind, you'll get us all killed!"
He didn't slow. Didn't turn. His boots hammered the jungle floor.
"Kamijo-san, stop!" That was Mutsumi, breath ragged, struggling to keep him in sight through the underbrush. "You don't know these trees, you'll lose your footing and then we lose you too!"
"Then don't follow me!" He hurled the words over his shoulder without looking. "I don't need any of you!"
Hands grabbed at his jacket from behind. Haibu, faster than the rest, had closed the gap, fingers twisting into the fur collar.
"You'll run straight into their nest alone and die," Haibu ground out, hauling back against him. "Slow down. We go together or you go into the ground. Pick one."
Atsushi wrenched against the grip, snarling, spit flying from his lips.
He tore free of Haibu's hand and stumbled forward, and the whole group crashed after him through the ferns, a scattered desperate line chasing a boy who chased a monster, deeper and deeper into the shadowed heart of the island.
As the jungle blurred past him in streaks of green and shadow. Atsushi's lungs burned and behind him the voices rose and fell like the drone of insects he couldn't shake off.
"He's going to get himself killed." Ayumi's voice, sharp with frustration. "We have to stop him before he leads us straight into another nest."
"And how do you suggest we do that?" Misuzu snapped back, twigs snapping under her feet. "Tackle him? He's swinging an axe around like a lunatic."
"We can't just abandon him." Mutsumi, closer now, her breath coming in gasps. "If we split up out here, we're all dead."
"So we die together instead? Great plan."
"Both of you, stop it." Haibu's voice cut through them, low and hard. "Save your breath. Just keep him in sight."
Atsushi heard all of it and none of it. The words washed over him and slid away, meaningless as the buzz of flies. Let them argue. Let them scream at each other until their throats bled. He didn't need their permission. He didn't need their plans, their fear or their careful little rules about what was smart and what wasn't. Akira was out there. Akira was in the hands of that thing, that grinning chitinous whore with her wandering fingers and her filthy tongue. Now every second Atsushi wasted was a second she spent doing God knew what to him.
He could still see it. Her hand wrapped around Akira's cock. Her tail grinding between his thighs. Akira's body betraying him, swelling for her while his eyes stayed empty and glazed, unable to fight, unable to scream, unable to do anything but take it.
The image drove Atsushi's legs harder than any fear ever could.
"Akira!" He roared it into the canopy, voice breaking on the second syllable. "I'm coming! Hold on, damn it, just hold on!"
A root caught his boot. He went down hard, palms slamming into the wet earth, the hand axe skittering from his grip into the ferns. Pain lanced up his wrists. He was on his feet again before he'd finished falling, snatching the axe back up, spitting dirt and leaf rot from his mouth.
"Kamijo-san!" Mutsumi's voice, alarmed. "Are you—"
"I'm fine!" He didn't look back. Couldn't. If he looked back he'd see their faces, all that pity and worry, and he'd have to admit how much his hands were shaking. "Just keep up or don't."
The trees thinned ahead. The light changed, grew looser, the dense canopy giving way to something wider and more open. Atsushi pushed through a wall of hanging vines, the leaves slapping cold and wet across his face, and stumbled out into a clearing.
Another house.
It squatted in the green like a corpse the jungle hadn't finished swallowing. Older than the others, the wood gone black with rot and age, the roof caved in at one corner where a tree had punched through it decades ago. Moss carpeted the walls in thick green fur. The paper screens had long since disintegrated, leaving the frames gaping like empty eye sockets. Vines strangled the support beams, and the whole structure leaned, sagging toward collapse but somehow still standing.
Atsushi stopped at the edge of the clearing, chest heaving, sweat and grime stinging his eyes.
"Akira?" His voice came out smaller now. Uncertain. He scanned the sky above the ruined roof, searching for a flash of chitin, for beating wings, for anything. Nothing but empty air and the drifting motes of pollen catching the light. "Where the fuck did you go..."
The others crashed into the clearing behind him one by one. Ayumi first, then Haibu, then Mutsumi clutching that stupid frog bad to her chest, followed by the stragglers—Misuzu and Mami and Kazuhiko, Miki drifting in last like a shadow.
"Another one of these houses." Kazuhiko wiped his brow, staring up at the ruin. "How many did they build out here?"
"Whoever they were." Mutsumi caught her breath, eyes moving over the black timber with that quick analytical flick. "This one's much older than the others. Look at the tree growing through the roof. That took decades. This place has been abandoned far longer."
"I don't care how old it is." Atsushi rounded on them, axe still gripped white-knuckled in his fist. "The wasp went this way. She came down near here, I know she did. Akira's close. We search the house."
"You don't know that." Ayumi stepped toward him, hands raised, palms open. "You lost sight of her back in the trees. We all did. Charging into a rotting house that could collapse on our heads isn't going to—"
"Then stay outside!" He jabbed the axe toward the sagging doorway. "Stay out here and be useful for once. I'm going in."
"Atsushi." Haibu's voice again, that infuriating calm. "If she nested here, there could be a tunnel. Like the last one. Full of those things." He nodded toward the black interior. "You walk in there alone, you don't walk out. You saw what was down the last hole."
Atsushi's jaw clenched so hard it hurt. He had seen. He'd heard Haibu's ragged account of the chamber below, the transforming women with their oil-slicked hands and their whispered chant. The thought of Akira down some black pit, surrounded by those creatures, made his stomach twist into a knot of acid.
But it also made him move.
"Then come with me or don't." He turned his back on them and stalked toward the doorway, boots crunching over debris. "I'm not standing out here while they—" His voice cracked. He swallowed it down. "While they have him. Not for one more second."
He crossed the threshold into the dark of the house, the rotted floorboards groaning under his weight, and the smell hit him at once. Damp wood. Old decay. And beneath it, faint and sickly sweet, something that curdled his blood.
The same wet, rhythmic sound Haibu had described came drifting up from somewhere deeper in the ruin.
Atsushi tightened his grip on the axe and stepped into the shadows.
The floorboards gave way to something worse the deeper Atsushi went.
He followed the sound through the ruin, past collapsed screens and rooms swallowed by moss, the axe trembling in his grip. The wet rhythm grew louder with each step, that sickening slap of flesh against flesh, that low chorus of moans threading through the dark. His stomach churned. His pulse hammered in his ears. But he kept moving, kept pushing forward, because somewhere down here was Akira and nothing else mattered.
The back room opened before him, and there it was.
A hole. Bored clean through the rotted floor and into the earth beneath, its walls smooth and compressed like the last one, but this one was bigger. Far bigger. A gaping black throat wide enough to swallow three men abreast, descending in a lazy spiral into a darkness his eyes couldn't pierce. Warm air breathed up from it, thick with that cloying sweetness that coated the back of his tongue and made his head swim.
Atsushi stopped at the lip of it.
For the first time since the wasp had risen out of reach with Akira in her arms, the running stopped. The rage that had carried him blind through the jungle guttered down to something smaller, and in the sudden quiet, fear crept in through the cracks.
He knew what was down there.
Haibu's voice echoed in his skull. The chamber. The transforming women with their oil-slicked hands. The dozen half-changed things chanting cock in the dark, groping. He'd heard it. He'd heard the terror Haibu tried to hide behind that flat voice, and that bastard wasn't afraid of anything.
Atsushi's boots wouldn't move. His knuckles had gone bloodless around the axe handle. He stared down into that black spiral and his whole body screamed at him to step back, to turn around, to run the other way, because whatever waited at the bottom would take him apart the same way it had nearly taken Haibu.
"Akira." The name came out cracked and small. He hated the sound of it. Hated how his hand shook. "Come on. Where are you."
He crouched at the edge, squinting into the gloom, and forced his eyes to adjust. Shapes resolved out of the dark. The curve of the tunnel wall. A pale scatter of something on a ledge maybe twenty feet down where the spiral first bent out of sight.
Cloth.
A dark blue blazer, crumpled and discarded against the compressed earth. A white button-up shirt beside it, half-torn, one sleeve ripped clean off. Blue slacks tangled with them, the black belt still threaded through the loops. Brown dress shoes tipped on their sides.
Atsushi's breath stopped in his chest.
He knew those clothes. He'd seen Akira in that blazer a thousand times, seen him tug that high collar straight, seen him thread that belt every morning. And now they lay scattered down that hole like something shed and left behind, stripped off and cast aside, and the only reason clothes came off down there was—
The fear evaporated.
It didn't fade. It didn't ebb. It burned away all at once in a white flash of fury that lit up every nerve in his body, and the image slammed into him unbidden and unbearable. Akira naked. Akira paralyzed and stripped bare in the dark, those creatures crawling over him with their slick hands and their filthy tongues, doing to him what the wasp had started in the air. His friend. His brother. The one person who'd ever dropped from the sky to stand at his back when six men circled him with pipes. Naked and helpless in the hands of monsters while Atsushi crouched at the edge of the hole and shook like a coward.
Watch each other's back. Always. No matter what. No matter who.
"Akira!" The roar tore out of him and boomed down the spiral, swallowed by the dark. "I'M COMING!"
He didn't think. He didn't plan. He gripped the axe and he jumped.
"ATSUSHI, NO!"
The scream came from behind him, a chorus of them, Ayumi and Mutsumi and Haibu all crashing into the back room in the same instant his boots left the edge. He caught a blur of their faces at the lip of the hole, mouths wide, hands reaching, too late, always too late.
"DON'T JUMP!"
Then the dark took him.
The tunnel wall rushed up and he hit it shoulder-first, the compressed earth softer than stone but hard enough to punch the air from his lungs. He slid, tumbled, the spiral catching him and flinging him downward. His hip cracked against the ledge where the clothes lay and he snatched blind at them as he fell, fingers closing around a fistful of white cotton, Akira's shirt torn from the earth and dragged down with him into the black.
He rolled, skidded than slammed through the darkness, the warm sweet air roaring past his ears, the voices above shrinking to nothing. His stomach lurched. He couldn't tell up from down anymore, couldn't see, could only feel the smooth walls rushing under him and the axe still somehow gripped in one hand and Akira's shirt crushed to his chest with the other.
He clung to the fabric like it was the boy himself.
The spiral flattened. The floor came up hard and threw him tumbling across packed earth, and he came to rest sprawled on his back in a warmth that pressed against him from every side. The sweet stink was everywhere now, thick as syrup, coating his throat and fogging his skull. Somewhere close, in the dark he couldn't see through, the wet rhythmic sounds went on and on, and beneath them, the whispers rose.
"Akira," Atsushi rasped into the black, dragging himself up on one elbow, the axe scraping against the earth as he raised it. "I'm here. I'm here, you hear me? I'm—"
The whispers turned toward him.
Atsushi's eyes adjusted to the gloom the way a man's eyes adjust to a nightmare, slow and unwilling, dragging shapes out of the dark that he'd have given anything not to see.
The chamber was enormous. Far larger than the tunnel had any right to promise, a domed cavern of packed earth and glistening resin, lit by clusters of some faint luminescent fungus that clung to the ceiling in pale green patches. The walls oozed. Everything oozed, slick with that sweet viscous fluid that pooled in the low spots and dripped from the honeycombed alcoves bored into the earth. And in the light of that sickly glow, five of them turned to look at him.
Five wasp women.
They lounged among the alcoves like empresses draped across their thrones, their bodies gleaming with the same chitinous sheen he'd watched drift through the canopy. The nearest reclined on a mound of resin, one leg cocked, the other stretched long, and every inch of her body was made to be looked at. Her breasts sat heavy and swollen on her chest, dark-tipped and slick, sliding against one another as she shifted to face him. Her waist pinched so narrow he could've spanned it in his hands before it flared into hips wide and full, the black and yellow bands of her abdomen wrapping down to where a segmented tail curled lazily behind her, its stinger glistening wet. Between her thighs, the slit of her sex glistened openly, unashamed, dripping the same clear fluid that coated everything down here.
Beside her sprawled another, sleeker and more athletic, her markings sharper, her breasts smaller but no less full, her stomach cut with lean muscle beneath the banded chitin. He recognized her. The second wasp, the one who'd carried Akira through the trees, her secondary arms folded across her chest as she studied him with those refracting compound eyes.
And there, higher up, curled into an alcove with something pale and limp cradled against her, was the first. The big one. The one who'd plucked Chitose from the clearing forty feet into the air. Her body was fuller than the others, riper, her breasts massive where they pressed against the naked girl tucked into her embrace, and Atsushi caught a flash of brown braids, a glasses frame catching the fungal light, before the wasp shifted and hid Chitose behind the curve of her body.
The other two watched from the shadows near the far wall, their forms half-lost in the dark, gleaming eyes and swollen curves and the wet shine of parted thighs.
And around them all, crawling through the muck, clinging to the walls, dragging themselves across the floor on hands and knees, were the others. The larvae women. Dozens of them, human girls caught mid-change, secondary arms budding from their ribs, stingers pushing wet from the base of their spines, their eyes gone glassy and iridescent. They moved among the wasp queens like servants, moaning softly, touching themselves, chanting that single broken word under their breath as they turned toward the fresh meat sprawled on the chamber floor.
"Cock."
Atsushi scrambled backward until his spine hit the wall, the axe raised in a shaking fist, Akira's torn shirt still crushed against his chest.
"Stay back!" His voice cracked and shattered against the domed ceiling. "I'll take your fucking heads off, all of you, stay the fuck back!"
The five wasp women did not move toward him. They looked at one another instead, and when they spoke, their voices layered and buzzed, thick with amusement and something hungrier beneath it.
"A male," the sleek one hummed, tilting her head. "Come down on his own. Into the deep. By himself." Her tongue flicked out, tasting the air. "None has ever done such a thing."
"They are dragged," the reclining one agreed, dragging a slick finger up the inside of her own thigh. "Carried. Paralyzed. Never do they walk into our home willing." She turned those refracting eyes on Atsushi and he felt them crawl over every inch of him. "Look at him. Still standing. Still fighting the poison in the air." She breathed deep, and her breasts swelled with it. "He has not even breathed enough to soften yet. Such fire."
"That one is mine," said one of the wasps that were half hidden, her buzzing voice cutting sharp across the chamber. "He came for the blonde. The blonde is spoken for. This screamer is not."
"You have two already," the sleek one snapped back, uncoiling from her alcove. "Greedy sister. You cannot hold every male on the island."
"He belongs to no nest yet." One of the two from the shadows finally spoke, sliding forward into the green light, and she was smaller than the rest, her body sinuous and starved-looking, her sex already dripping down her thighs at the sight of him. "I have no mate. My burrow is empty and cold." She crawled a slow step closer, secondary arms reaching. "I would take him back to my own nest. Fill it with him. He has enough fire for a hundred clutches."
"As would I," the fifth murmured again, joining her, two hungry wasps advancing across the muck while the queens argued above them. "So much fight in him. Such strong seed. I want him screaming under me while I bleed him dry."
"He is not for you," the big one snarled, half-rising from her alcove, Chitose slipping limp from her grip. "Sisters, no. He is not for the wandering ones."
Atsushi swung the axe at empty air, backing along the wall, his mind a screaming blank of terror and rage while the creatures bickered over his body like it was meat on a hook. The larvae women crept closer at the edges, hands outstretched, chanting, oil-slicked fingers reaching for his ankles.
"Akira!" he roared into the chamber, wild-eyed, searching the alcoves for a flash of blonde. "AKIRA, WHERE ARE YOU!"
The wasps went quiet.
Then, together, they smiled.
The sleek wasp uncurled from her alcove with a slow, deliberate grace, wings folding flat against her back. She crawled up the resin-slick wall to the honeycombed chamber above, and when she turned, she carried him.
Akira.
Atsushi's whole body locked.
The wasp cradled his friend against her chest with all four arms, holding him up into the green fungal glow so Atsushi could see, so there'd be no mistaking what she wanted him to see. Akira was naked. Stripped bare from collar to feet, that undercut plastered to his forehead with sweat and something thicker, his lean body sprawled limp and boneless in her grip. And crawling over him, clinging to every inch of exposed skin, were the larvae women.
There had to be six of them. Seven. They swarmed Akira's body in a writhing knot, their glassy iridescent eyes half-lidded, their long changed tongues dragging in wet stripes up his stomach, his chest, his throat. One knelt between his thighs and lapped at him with slow devotion, her cheek pressed to his hip, tongue coiling. Another laved his nipple, sucking, moaning around it. Two more traced the lines of his ribs, cleaning the sweat and oil from his skin with reverent care, their secondary arms cradling him, stroking, worshiping.
Akira's head lolled against the wasp's collarbone. His eyes were barely open, black slivers glazed and unfocused, and his lips parted around a broken, helpless sound. A moan. Low and involuntary, dragged out of him by the tongues working his body, his hips giving a feeble twitch he couldn't control.
"No." The word came out of Atsushi in a whisper, all the air gone from him. "No, no, no—"
"You see?" The big wasp descended from her own alcove, Chitose forgotten behind her, her massive breasts swaying as she crawled down the wall toward Akira and his swarm. Her buzzing voice thickened with pleasure, warm and proud. "Her daughters. They tend him so well." She reached out and stroked a hand down Akira's cheek, tilting his face toward Atsushi, forcing the boy's glazed eyes toward his friend. "They clean him. They ready him. They wake his body from the poison sleep so that when she take him, he will give her everything."
The larvae women moaned in answer, their tongues moving faster, and Akira's breath hitched into another shuddering groan, his back arching a fraction off the wasp's chest.
The the wasp that stole him face changed then. Something crawled up her banded throat and bloomed across those inhuman features, and Atsushi realized with sick clarity that she was blushing. Her compound eyes went soft and heavy-lidded. Her tongue flicked out to wet her lips. She looked at Akira the way a starving woman looked at a feast, her thighs rubbing together, her segmented tail curling and uncurling behind her with barely contained want.
"He will be such a good mate," she breathed, and there was genuine longing in it, a hunger so raw it turned Atsushi's stomach. "I have waited so long for one with this much life left in him. When my daughters finish, when he is ready and dripping and desperate—" Her hand slid down Akira's stomach, following the path of a larva's tongue. "I will fill my burrow with him for seasons."
"GET YOUR HANDS OFF HIM!"
The roar ripped Atsushi's throat raw. He came off the wall in a lunge, axe swinging in a wild arc, the fear burned to ash by the sight of Akira moaning helpless in a monster's arms.
"He's not yours! He's not a fucking meal, he's not a mate, he's my—" His voice shattered. He caught himself, blade trembling, chest heaving. "Let him go. LET HIM GO or I swear to God I'll cut every one of you open, I'll burn this whole hole down around your heads, I'll—"
"Such noise," the sleek wasp purred, unbothered, sliding down beside him. "Such fire. Sisters, do you feel it?"
The two mateless wasps answered with a shudder of delight.
They pressed in from the sides, the starved sinuous one and her hungry companion, and the closer they got the more their bodies betrayed their want. Fluid ran freely down their inner thighs. Their breasts heaved with quickening breath. The smaller one reached for him with all four hands, fingers splayed and grasping, her mouth open in a moan that mirrored the larvae's chant.
"You threaten," she breathed, delighted, crawling nearer as Atsushi swung the axe to keep her back. "You scream. You promise fire and blood." Her tongue lolled out, dripping. "It only makes me want you more."
"Look at him," the other cooed, circling, forcing Atsushi to whip his head between them, unable to watch both at once. "Look how strong. How much fight. My burrow has been empty so long, screamer. So cold and so quiet." She pressed a hand to her own breast, kneading, her hips rolling. "You will fill it. You will fight and rage and I will hold you down and drink every drop of you."
"Stay back!" Atsushi's blade caught the sinuous one across the forearm and skittered off the chitin without leaving a mark. She didn't even flinch. She smiled wider.
"Soon," she promised, sweet and thick and terrible, edging closer despite the axe, her sisters flanking him, herding him from the wall. "Soon you will be like your blonde friend. We will carry you back to our nest, and my daughters will tend you the way hers tend him." She nodded toward Akira, moaning in the queen's arms, tongues still working his slack body. "They will clean you. Wake you. Ready you. And you will lie there in the dark and moan for us just like that, no matter how much you scream now."
"You will beg for it," her companion whispered against his ear from behind, and Atsushi spun, blade flashing at nothing. "They all beg, in the end. Especially the ones with such fire."
The larvae women lifted their heads from Akira's body and turned toward Atsushi as one, glassy eyes shining, tongues dripping, and began to crawl.
"Cock," they whispered, reaching. "Cock, cock, cock."
Atsushi's back hit the resin wall.
Atsushi swung the axe in a wide arc and bought himself half a step of space. The wall pressed cold and slick against his spine. His boots slid in the muck as he shoved sideways, keeping the blade between himself and the crawling swarm, his heart slamming so hard it hurt.
"Back off! I'll gut you, I'll gut every last one of you, back the fuck OFF!"
The words poured out of him without thought, a torrent of curses and threats that meant nothing, because inside his skull there was only white noise and terror. He had no plan. No way out. Akira hung limp surrounded by moaning tongues, and Atsushi couldn't climb to him, couldn't fight through five wasps and a dozen half-changed things, couldn't do anything but scream and swing while backing into a corner like the cornered animal he was.
"You winged bitches, I'll kill you, I'll—"
Something crashed down beside him from the tunnel mouth above, landing in a spray of muck.
"Would you SHUT UP!"
Ayumi. She came up in a fighting crouch, chest heaving, broken knife gripped in her fist, her eyes wild as they swept the chamber. A second later Haibu dropped down behind her, then Mutsumi, then Nozomi, the four of them skidding to a halt on the slick floor.
They saw it all at once.
Atsushi watched the horror bloom across their faces. Haibu's jaw went tight. Mutsumi's hand flew to her mouth. Nozomi's blue eyes went huge in the green glow, sweeping the dozens of writhing larvae, the five gleaming queens, the swarm devouring Akira with their tongues.
Then Mutsumi's gaze found the alcove where the big wasp had left her prize.
"CHITOSE!"
The scream tore out of her raw. Atsushi followed it and saw. Chitose sprawled naked across the resin, glasses askew, braids fanned in the muck, three larvae women crawling over her paralyzed body. One dragged a long changed tongue up the inside of her thigh. Another laved her breast, sucking, moaning around the flesh. Chitose's head lolled, her light brown eyes glazed and half-shut, her chest rising in shallow helpless hitches while the tongues worked her.
"No, no, get off her!" Mutsumi lunged a step and Haibu caught her arm. "Get OFF HER!"
The wasps stirred at the fresh arrivals, and a ripple of pleasure moved through the chamber.
"More," the sleek one breathed, uncoiling toward them, her breasts swaying. "So many more. Sisters, look, look what walked into our home."
"Females." The starved one nearly moaned it, crawling toward Mutsumi and Ayumi with hunger dripping down her thighs. "New sisters. My daughters will make them so beautiful."
But it was Haibu who drew the worst of it. Every gleaming compound eye in the chamber turned to him, and the change that swept the wasps was obscene. The queens' thighs pressed together. Their tongues flicked out. The big one who cradled Akira actually shivered, her breath catching.
"A male," she purred, and her voice thickened with want. "Another male. Strong. Whole. Oh, sisters, he would fill a burrow so well—"
"Don't you LOOK at him!"
Nozomi's shriek cracked across the cavern. She stepped in front of Haibu, arms spread, her kind face twisted into something feral, spit flying from her lips. "You keep your filthy eyes off him! I'll rip your wings off if you so much as breathe near him, you disgusting bugs!"
The wasps only smiled wider, delighted by the fire in her, licking their lips as they watched Haibu over her shoulder.
"Everyone stop." Haibu's voice cut low and hard, but even he sounded shaken. He gripped his folding knife and put his back to the others, forming a rough circle. "We're surrounded. Don't panic. Don't scatter."
"Chitose's over there," Mutsumi gasped, tears cutting clean down her filthy cheeks. "She's alive, she's still alive, we have to get her out, we can't leave her, not to—" Her voice broke. "Not to be food for them, we HAVE to save her!"
"Akira too!" Atsushi bellowed from his corner, forcing his way through the muck to reach the others, axe raised. He shouldered in beside Haibu, chest to chest with the horror of it, his eyes locked on the blonde head lolling in the queen's grip. "You hear me? Akira too! He's right there, that thing's got him, we're not leaving without him! We take them both or we don't leave at all!"
"You're insane, we can barely—" Ayumi started.
"BOTH OF THEM!" Atsushi's voice shredded. "I'm not going anywhere without him! I swore it, you understand? I swore I'd have his back, no matter what, no matter who, and I'm not breaking it, not for you, not for anything!"
The five humans pressed into a tight knot in the center of the chamber broken blades, a frog bag and bare fists their only weapons, with the ring of insect women closed slowly around them. The wasps above. The mateless ones crawling in from the sides, dripping and moaning. The dozens of larvae women dragging themselves across the muck, hands outstretched, tongues lolling, that broken word rising into a chant that filled the whole dripping cavern.
"Cock. Cock. Cock."
Akira moaned somewhere above them, helpless, and the sound drove a spike of pure rage through Atsushi's terror.
He tightened his grip on the axe until his knuckles screamed. He fixed his eyes on his friend, on that limp body he'd chased through a jungle and jumped down a hole into hell to reach, and he made the promise again, silent this time, a vow forged two years gone.
I'm getting you out. I don't care what these things are. I'm getting you out, Akira. Always.