Her Majesty’s Swarm - Volume 3 - Chapter SS

Special Side Story: The Insects Ponder 

Everything the Arachnea’s queen, Grevillea, experienced was transmitted to the entire Swarm. Thus, the majority of them felt a whole palette of emotions for the very first time. When she first resolved to take revenge, the Swarm were driven by that anger. When the elf boy died, the Swarm were flooded with a rage the likes of which they had never known. But did the individual Swarms have feelings of their own? 

The Swarms pondered. 

If what the queen felt could be called emotion, then they had nothing that corresponded to it. There was nothing within them that inherently drove them forward other than their natural instinct to conquer. Despite having this impulse, they had never considered the reason they had it. It was simply there. A drive without a reason or a cause. 

But every time they were throttled by the tides of their queen’s emotions, the Swarm felt that the pillar of their desire for conquest was being shaken. Everything was still as it had always been when they’d conquered the Kingdom of Maluk. After they’d entered the Dukedom of Schtraut, on the other hand, something had gone awry. 

The queen had not simply sought to dominate that country; she’d attempted to negotiate. They had not infiltrated for conquest, but for an alliance. She had nearly been successful, too, but then everything had gone to ruin. 

After that, their queen’s heart was filled with a suffocating sense of futility—and, alongside it, a deep rage and a desire to slaughter the ones who’d killed her potential allies. What the Swarm felt next was an emotion they were seldom assailed by: pity. 

The Swarms pondered. 

How and why was their queen graced with such an abundance of emotion? If she were a Swarm, she would not need emotion and would simply crush others on impulse... But she was not. Would they have been better off if she did not carry all these feelings inside her? 

No, they would not. The presence of emotions enabled them to discover new things. To learn of anger, of sadness, of joy. And it was thanks to those emotions that they were no longer merely a hive mind. 

The Swarm accepted the queen’s emotions, and they wished to adopt more of them in the future. In doing so, they would mature; no longer mere monsters, they would evolve into a new life-form. Yes, they would become a creature capable of understanding the human heart. And if they could learn to read the hearts of others, perhaps they would be that much closer to victory. 

That was what the Swarms pondered at first. 

While they could understand emotions, they could not easily grasp the reasons behind them unless they were fairly simple. For example, when the queen wanted to experience the human pastime of swimming in the ocean, the Swarm couldn’t quite understand her motivations. 

Was entering the sea pleasant? Why did the queen feel guilt at not inviting everyone along? Pulling Swarms from the front lines to concentrate them at the rear during wartime would have been foolish. 

The Swarm could not understand the concept of fun. Even if their desire for conquest was to be fulfilled, they did not perceive it in terms of pleasure or enjoyment. They did not know anything that could be called as such. They had no desire to feed, sleep, or copulate, so they did not possess the need to be entertained. 

The Swarms pondered. 

What was “fun”? Sérignan, who stood out among them for having a name and personality of her own, was thought to know the answer. Like the queen, she was capable of enjoying meals, and most importantly, she derived pleasure from being at the queen’s side. 

Like Sérignan, the other Swarms regarded the queen with respect and affection, but they did not feel enjoyment in her company. After all, all it took was for one of them to be near her, and the experience would be shared by the collective. Besides, the queen’s presence was only natural. When the time came for her to leave them, it would be their end. 

What would the Swarm feel then? They did not understand the sorrow of parting. When Lysa lost Linnet and became part of the Swarm, her experiences poured into the collective consciousness. But the other Swarms could not understand her emotions. They could not parse the meaning of parting eternally from a loved one. 

Their understanding of death was all too sparse to begin with. All were one and one was all, and so to them, true death did not exist. If one of them fell, it would be replaced by another. Each Swarm’s individual will lingered in the collective even after its body ceased to function. And it didn’t matter how many of them died; their concept of death would not become concrete until the very last Swarm perished. 

By their very nature, the Swarm could not understand death or the emotions that came from an eternal goodbye. But little by little, they were beginning to understand it through the queen’s emotions. The queen had endured many partings, and each time it happened, she suppressed the hatred, murderous intent, and sadness that swirled in her heart. In turn, the Swarm responded to those feelings; they slaughtered according to the baleful tempest in her heart. But how were they supposed to respond to her sadness? 

The Swarms pondered. 

What was sadness? What kind of feeling was sorrow? The Swarm did not know. Understanding the queen’s grief was difficult for them. 

But they were learning, bit by bit, how people handled sadness. Those who suffered shared their sorrow, lessening one another’s burdens. The queen had shared in Lysa’s pain as much as she could, and the Swarm recognized that in doing so, the clouds of Lysa’s sorrow had cleared somewhat. 

When the queen felt sad, were they to share in her pain? Would they be able to lift some of the burden of her sorrows? 

They wouldn’t, for the Swarm felt no sorrow. 

The Swarms pondered. 

If the time were to come when the Swarm truly understood human emotions, would the queen view them as something special? If they were finally able to understand how she felt, would they have at last become Her Majesty’s vassals? 

“All hail the queen.” 

The Swarms would keep on pondering until they met their very end.