Skitter vs. Crawler

There wasn’t much my bugs could do. They settled on Crawler and found his flesh impenetrable. I began preparing web nets, drawing lines of silk between my airborne bugs. Amy’s relay bugs had afforded me the chance to pick up far more bugs than I otherwise might have. My attention flickered over my swarm.

Nearly a million spiders. They were only a relatively small percentage of the swarm itself. I had more ants, termites, flies, aphids, gnats and beetles to form the bulk of my army.

I sent the more useless ones toward Amy. Not so many that I overwhelmed her, but enough that she always had more at hand.

He’s big, he’s strong, he’s ridiculously tough, but he’s no Leviathan.

My spiders began weaving their threads into braids, the flying bugs directing them in and through loops of silk as the threads spooled out. Where bugs couldn’t hover, they directed their flight into tight corkscrews to slow themselves.

I wondered if this was the most bugs I’d ever controlled. The buzz of my power thrummed through me to the point that I was barely aware of myself and where I was standing. It wasn’t just the number of bugs, but the number of instructions. Spiders were spooling thread, organizing by the amounts they had remaining. Flying bugs were gathering in formations, carrying the slower bugs forward and maneuvering the spiders to spin webs. Smaller bugs, the useless ones, I directed to Amy and formed into dozens of decoys. Millions of instructions a second.

Estimates said that insects outnumbered people by two hundred million to one in worldwide population. Part of that distribution was biased toward rainforests and other areas humans left uninhabited.

At the end of the day, that was just insects, and there were more creatures under my sway than the six-legged variety. I could feel them in the earth, in the walls, beneath the pavement, even. Even from the weeks after I’d left the hospital, I’d dismissed them as background noise, just sources to draw from in amassing my swarms.

Now, it felt different. My range was extended, and it wasn’t because I was distracted, cornered, trapped. As Crawler noticed us and shifted his position to keep us all in line of sight with his innumerable eyes, I had a few moments to think, to experience my power at its best.

We were so small. Even in the scope of a single neighborhood, my power extending for roughly a thousand feet in every direction, it made us all seem tiny. Even Crawler.

********



Crawler’s pause to grab concrete had bought me time to get my bugs into position. They swept over Crawler, laying down braided ropes of silk joined by adhesive lines and thin gossamer. Even caterpillars began offering their assistance, using the silk they produced for cocoons.

He was a big guy, but it was a lot of silk.

I could see how it hampered his movements. There was even something approximating surprise on his face as he dropped down so all six legs were firmly on the ground, and his forelimbs didn’t extend as far as he’d expected. He tried to run and found himself hampered further.

Crawler sported two or three tons of physical prowess, and his power had fine tuned him into a physical specimen like few others. My bugs had millions of years of evolution to refine the quality of their silk and their ability to produce it.

For now, at the very least, I had the advantage.

********


“Run, little girl!” Crawler’s broken voice carried, a rumble so low I could feel it. “I’ll get free! I’ll catch you! I’ll hold you down and lick your skin until it melts! I’ll pluck your eyes out with the tip of my tongue! I have your scent and you cannot ever stop me! You cannot ever escape!”