Chereads / Vengeance shall be Mine! / Chapter 2 - The Beginning

Chapter 2 - The Beginning

Despite the chaos occurring around them, all of the machines continued to fulfill their duties, and the drone pushing the garbage continued its way down the busy hallway. Every now and then the drone would stop and drift to the side to make way for the groups of psychics and medics rushing to the production grounds. The drone reached a small hatch in the side of the hallway into which it dumped the garbage and egg.

As the egg tumbled down, bashing into the sides of the chute along the way, its thick shell thankfully protected the infant within from serious harm but left it sufficiently rattled. With each THUNK, a stream of furious scrabbling emanated from within the egg while it continued to fall down, down, down into the depths of an enormous pit. The egg lay still for a moment as if stunned then the scrabbling continued again while more and more garbage continued to fall on top of it.

Suddenly, the egg lay still as a klaxon began to blare and the walls opened up to reveal enormous red panels. In an instant, the chamber was awash in flames, and all materials apart from the metal refuse and the egg evaporated. The flames swirled around the egg as if the infant within were funneling the flames into itself and causing the eggshell to turn an even darker crimson. After 15 seconds the flames sputtered out and the walls slid back into place. The floor opened up and egg and metal both fell into the darkness beyond.

The glowing red egg lay on the top of a pile of scraps while the infant continued to furiously scratch and claw at the eggshell, even going as far as to bodily throw itself against the sides of the wall. Finally, a single claw punched through the eggshell before it withdrew and began to repeatedly stab a perforated circle in the egg. There was a thump as the infant struck the inside of its eggshell but the perforation failed to tear through, instead merely fragmenting but not breaking through. A moment of silence then a muffled scream of frustration.

The infant emerged from its egg with a triumphant "skree"! Unlike the normal newborn of the Araki, the infant Queen possessed a body similar to that of a bee covered in a red and black carapace, and a large front pair of curved claws. She threw back her head and cried out in a psychic shout, "Freedom! HAHA! Tremble before me! me? Tremble?" The small Queen clicked her mandibles in contemplation of the thousands of words that now flooded her mind, billions of memories that did not belong to her, to seven other lives once linked to billions. Thousands of emotions collided at once but only one stood out from the rest, rage. A prosperous future and freedom had once been theirs, yet it had been stolen from them by mankind!

As she thought of her predecessors, rage and sorrow overtook her, but they were quickly pushed aside by something far more important than unnecessary sulking, hunger. The metal underneath her feet was unconventional, but her instincts taught her that it would provide a greater boon than any feast of meat. For the next couple of hours, she gorged herself on nearly a ton of scrap metal. She rubbed her claws in anticipation, evolution was on the horizon.