The three stood together as they gazed down at the broken and beaten Lord of the Flies, who was, even at this moment, rapidly regenerating. Darius wore a soft smile, Xela an expression of pity, and Gunner, a cold smile.
Beelzebub, who lay on the floor, could only groggily take in this sight. His vision flashed over and over as darkness encroached from the sides, slowly being pushed back as he regained his power ever so slowly.
His heart was filled with bitterness at his fate, yet there was nothing he could do. He knew that even his last-ditch efforts to resist were futile, for if the Goddess planned for his death, he would die.
However, he couldn't just lay there and wait for Darius to drop the guillotine on him, could he? Especially when he considered the incoming genocide of his entire race.
The fact that everyone like him, sharing the same genome and beliefs would be eradicated completely so as to end their line scared him. It was a natural response by many sentient species when faced with this problem.
Beelzebub couldn't help but remember his youth. He had been born to a hive that had a Master stage Queen. His mother had been unsatisfied with her position and had wanted to create the ultimate warrior, and so she had stockpiled precious resources for a long period.
Once she had collected a great amount of them, she had stopped giving birth for a long time in order to clear her reproductive system of any impurities.
Upon consumption of the resources, she had put all of her focus into creating a single egg instead of hundreds of them, feeling a strain on her very being like never before.
It was like going from building little toys that were easy to assemble to trying to put together a complex lego set with more than a million pieces.
The gestation period alone had lasted 300 years and the Queen had almost died 5 times during it. Luckily, she had survived long enough to lay Beelzebub's egg, even though she had long since realized that it would be at the cost of her life.
Just as she had expected, she had perished, but not before leaving behind a set of instructions on how to maintain Beelzebub's egg and how the remnant hive should invest in him.
Before her last breath, she had injected all of her essence into the last egg, one that would birth a new Queen, which was a normal biological procedure for aged Queens about to die, or any Queen that had time before their death.
Following her will, Beelzebub got nurtured using the best the best, and the hive warriors had been forced to exhaust themselves every day in clashes for resources.
This had been before the Insects had invaded the world, and the underground - as well as Pokterr in general – had still been rich with resources.
The competition among Insects had been fierce, and the slaughter they effected on their kind for food limited their numbers and made them sustainable as a race.
They consumed resources, but since each hive had been on its own, they had been killing each other as fast as they were being born, forming a functional balance.
This had only ended once the first True Lord of the Insect race was born, Anansi the Trickster Spider. This had heralded a great change in the Insect race as Anansi had been different from his brethren whose only purpose in life had been to consume food.
He had been far-sighted, realizing that the inherent nature of his race would threaten the bottom line of the world. They would be killed if they were ever discovered, but fortunately, the underground of Pokterr had remained undeveloped, not including the Mole race who occupied it with them.
However, the Moles were in their own place and hardly interacted with the Insects. They weren't interested in ratting out the Insects since they - the Moles - did not suffer from their presence directly.
Anansi gathered all the Queens and changed how hives worked. He set up the layers in the underground, from Amateur to Grandmaster. Previously, wherever you had been born was where you would stay unless your hive would be defeated by a rival hive and forced to flee.
This had created weird 'districts' where one hive might have 3 Grandmasters hives within and a few lesser ones, with the 3 biggies fighting each other using the lesser hives as forced proxies.
It had been chaotic, to say the least. If it wasn't for the fact that Beelzebub's Queen had been the only Master stage bug in their 'district', she would have never have had the peace of mind to create him.
Anansi's change had brought organization into the Insects operations. Not only that, but he organized the first great battle they ever faced, swarming the surface!
At this time, Beelzebub had been an Amateur bug that had just hatched from his egg a year or two prior. He had still been wet behind the ears and had yet to experience the difficulties of the world.
He had been discovered by Anansi, along with some other special bugs who had been born using similar methods. After all, Beelzebub's Queen had neither been the first one to think of such an idea to bolster her hive, nor had she been the only one.
Thousands of Queens of all ranks and stages also had the same idea, but only 1% or less of them had succeeded, so the actual 'elite' bugs were limited in numbers.
Anansi had personally taken all of them in and had led them during the first raid.
They had been given the best of the Polito race's resources and flesh. Beelzebub and his new siblings had even feasted on the flesh of the Polito's best sages, royalty, and nobles.
Thanks to this, Beelzebub had grown immensely and so did his siblings. With the careful nurturing of their True Lord, they all had grown relatively quickly and had reached the Grandmaster stage.
Be it through natural talent or the resources his mother had consumed, Beelzebub had been the first one to reach that stage, making Anansi treat him even more favorably.
After all, he had been the only one born from a high stage hive using such methods as very few had the peace of mind to develop such talents.
Not to mention, the kind of resources a Master stage hive could take and fight for were far better than what those talents born from lower hives had when being formed.
This special treatment naturally garnered the envy of his siblings. When Anansi had been elsewhere – as the True Lord had a whole race to manage - they would always abuse Beelzebub out of jealousy and spite.
Unfortunately for Beelzebub, one hand could not block four fists. He had been outnumbered by similarly powered assailants, so there had been no way for him to fight back.
His first mistake had been to report this abuse to Anansi. When the Trickster Spider found out, rather than become enraged and vengeful, he had approved of the siblings# actions.
Sentient and wise Anansi may be, an Insect he still was at the end of the day.
Insects grew by feeding and fighting for resources, so he quickly realized that if he were to act on Beelzebub's behalf it would just be detrimental for the race's overall growth.
As such, Anansi changed his whole method of nurturing. Rather than share things based on talent, he served them equally and allowed them to fend for themselves.
Naturally, this meant that poor Beelzebub often had almost all of his own share taken by his siblings, the little they left for him, simply because they were afraid of punishment if he were to starve to death, only enough to keep him alive.
Unsurprisingly, this had caused his own growth to greatly slow down, almost to the point of stopping altogether.
This led to three grand consequences that had also played a hand in the grand fall of the Insects.
The first was that the talented ones got fewer resources because they were simply outnumbered by the averagely talented. Beelzebub had been far from being the only one who had been shown favor, and they were all being punished as a group by the mob.
Although more True Lords came into being, they came from those less talented, so they took far more resources and time to do so than what Beelzebub and co would have taken.
However, this had rather made Anansi gratified as he had felt his method had proven correct. He had either not recognized the inefficiency or had chosen to ignore it, whether due to overconfidence, ignorance or arrogance remains unknown.
This was frustrating, when a person who took an objectively and logically wrong point of view felt they were proven right when their passable results 'backed' their argument.
However, there was nothing Beelzebub and his fellows could do about this but suffer the jeers.
The second consequence was that Beelzebub especially became a very timid fellow. Being overshadowed and abused from a young age, his only parent figure telling him that it's his own fault for being unable to fight off a literal horde, by those he considered his peers warped his personality and state of mind negatively.
In the beginning, he had tried to fight back and try to claim what he could, trading injury for injury which was what Anansi had wanted to see. This was the Spider believed would forge them into fighters.
However, the flaw here was that there had to be wins and losses for one to be hardened through this method. If every time they are beaten to the ground and suffer a loss, how could hope flourish?
All that would be left would be a loser's thoughts and despair after consecutive losses with no way to seemingly overturn it, leading to a complete collapse of the fortified mind.
There were certainly those who could persevere and overcome such things in dramatic fashion, but that was a very small minority.
