She noticed almost immediately, drawing the can of aerosol spray she’d used to wipe out the first swarm I’d set on her. One hornet managed to sting her, and with my power as limited as it was, I couldn’t stop it from contracting its body in such a way as to inject its venom into her.
Why would you stop it?
…oh, right. Grue. Need her alive.
I wouldn’t have if I could.
Ah, okay.
(Seriously, I genuinely stopped right before that.)
The rest of the bugs died on contact with the spray, their bodies shutting down.
There’s gotta be a limit to how many bugs it can help against, right?
Except my order was a continuous directive, much as my calling my bugs to me had been when I’d passed out while fighting Bakuda. It worked on its own, without my direction.
I feel like the parallels are intentional. The entire situation is parallel to her encounter with Bakuda, and now she’s using a technique she found out she could do in the aftermath of that? That’s gotta be on purpose.
So what are the metanarrative reasons for these parallels? Is there something about Taylor’s growth since Arc 5 that Wildbow is trying to point out here? Or is it just a result of what Bonesaw would naturally do?
It was eerie to track their movements, to see just how much initiative they took without my conscious mind guiding them.
It does seem like they’re targeting specifically Bonesaw, at least.
They spread out, navigated past obstacles, they organized into ranks and tried to attack her from behind, while she was spraying the ones in front of her.
So if this is running off of Taylor’s subconscious, that suggests this is the kind of thing she doesn’t even really need to think about to do anymore.
Some of the flying insects were even dropping spiders onto Bonesaw.
Nice, they’ve even got the teamwork going.
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