That breath of the sun roared across the blanket of flowers, bursting in a fiery thoom. Dust and smoke blew into the air, and a cloud of dusty-ash was left in its wake.
Nothing could've survived that.
"Rest now, false whisperer," Beelaques said, her face showered by the falling ash.
Her gaze slowly tearing away from the battlefield, she turned to the stars. Their shimmering gaze was barely past the veil of dust and ash, but still she spoke to them. "Lay witness, sacred unity, I have bested their keeper."
"The false whisperer is no more-"
Beelaques's proclamation was cut short by a dronish buzzing. Her face twisted in annoyance.
A dark figure soared towards her from within the cloud, three sets of wings wisking the smoke around it. It was one of Han's bees —obsidian skin peeled off by the heat of the fireball— brandishing its lance of a stinger like a jousting knight from hell.
Beelaques scowled. Exposed to her queen's gaze, the battered bee might as well have been telling her where it would strike. And so she descended just a little to avoid its attack.
"Child, why do you follow a slain sovereign?" she asked, the bee stinging empty air above her. She opened her mouth to say something, but she must've realised that something was off.
A trap.
Han jumped from the bee's back like a demon spawn. He'd been cloaked in black ash and purposefully angled the bee's attack so that she could not have seen him.
But this would not be enough, and Han knew as much. Before her eyes, he must've been moving only a few millimetres per second.
Good thing a cheap attack like this was not the sort of foolish thing his mind gambled on.
He thrust both his daggers ahead of him, using them more to destroy her line of sight than to actually land a hit.
She swatted them away with little worry. After all, even with them, Han had no way of killing her.
But that sort of thinking would be her downfall.
Now only a few centimetres away from her;
"Scent of the Sun!"
Golden light boiled out of his mouth, blowing past the smoke and ash around him.
Beelaques's eyes widened, and she moved to escape its area of effect. But such a fast thing was a trait skill that even this fallen god could not escape its advance.
Her eyes flickered back to their original shade of gold, and she froze mid-air.
Han struggled through the air, grasping her shoulder's right as he was about to fall past her, and climbed onto her back.
His mind was overwhelmed by the sea of scents that now flooded it. It was hard enough to move, much less control his one remaining bee at the same time. And so, lacking sufficient mental capabilities, his summon was returned to the plan from whence it came.
Han's mind was slowly slipping.
This attack wasn't what he had originally planned. He had wanted to sacrifice his bee in an attempt to neutralise Jen... and perhaps Chul if the fates had so willed it. But it was do or die, and death by fireball wasn't exactly on his bucket list.
'What now? I already know I can't kill her,' he thought, his head throbbing from trying to think while battling sensory overload. 'But if I can't kill her, then perhaps that was never the win condition.'
Han thought back on the start of their fight, when he had stabbed her in the throat. Back then, she had said his way of fighting sullied the hive's traditions.
'Hmm.'
The inklings of a plan began to etch themselves into his mind. He didn't have a plan yet, but he had the shape of it.
"Lay witness, most sacred unity!" Han strained to shout, copying Beelaques's cadence exactly. "You have brought me here without a goal or clear purpose-" He had to stop to catch his breath; it was proving difficult to maintain the effect of Scent of the Sun.
"I have been tasked with besting a god," he continued. "And I have delivered."
A line of blood began to paint itself from his nose down to his lips. His brain felt like it was boiling inside his skull. He didn't have much time.
"What else do you seek of me?"
Those peering stars did nothing to respond.
He waited for a moment. If his guess was right, this was nothing but a testing ground. A place to see if he had the qualifications for whatever all this was.
But one second became two, and two four, before long, his eyes were bleeding from the strain of all his battling. Each exchange had chipped away at his health, and between controlling his bees and now using this skill, he was running on single digits.
'9 hp left.'
"Fuck."
Han looked down at Beelaques, shadows slowly intruding on the edges of his vision. "I have bested you," he whispered, strength leaving his body.
He brought his face close to hers and kissed her forehead as she had done at the start of this battle. His gambit had failed. He would die here today, not because he had misplayed, but because the game had been rigged against him.
Perhaps that was why he kissed her forehead. Some part of him wanted her to know, even if she lived to be a million years old, she would think back on this day. The day when a mortal such as him kissed her on the forehead and marked her as his equal.
Scent of the sun deactivated as Han lost feeling in his body.
'2 hp.'
Beelaques's face twisted in disbelief as she regained consciousness and realised what Han had done.
As he fell to his doom, consciousness slipping to oblivion, he felt... satisfaction. All his life, he had chased power, fought tooth and nail so that those who had been born into it would someday acknowledge him.
What cruel irony that he would find it in a place like this. Where all of that ceased to matter.
"I don't want to die."
The words spilt out of his mouth, surprising even him.
"Please... I don't want to die."
"Not yet."
『The Hive passes judgment.』
That notification was the last thing Han saw before darkness.