The heart of the hive is the Hexagota Queen. In many ways more of an organic production center than a singular Hexagota. Queens are massive and immobile, tethered to complex organic machines for their entire lives. In addition to leadership, their role to the hive is ensuring the steady creation of new Hexagota. This is a ceaseless task and the Queen must rely on their legion of Queenlings to enact their will beyond the walls of the hive.
The Queenlings are the command structure of the Hexagota. Capable of independent thought and issuing psychic commands to their swarm, they are in many ways their own Hexagota hive in miniature. However their mandates come directly from the Queen herself and disobedience will almost always mean a swift demise. When acting as intended by the Queen, they are left to choose how precisely to obey the Queen’s orders. The Queens consider this amount of autonomy a necessary evil and consider the benefit worth the risk.
In the game, Queenlings are terrifying melee combatants with the most action points of any other unit. Their chitin claws are razor sharp and as hard as phasic alloy. With immense strength behind every swing, these weapons are more than a match to any armor they might encounter. This confers them the armor piercing trait. Rather than a projectile weapon, a Queenling can launch a jet of digestive acid at a target. If the acid penetrates the target’s defenses it does grievous damage, as the acid burns and melts all it touches.
If this were not a scary enough prospect they are also the only unit in the game capable of taking psychic actions. These powerful abilities allow the Queenling to target a specific model, tearing it apart from within with psychically generated creatures. While the process is not entirely understood the prevailing theory is that it is not a spontaneous manifestation of life but rather the teleportation of a Hexagota pupae into the target. These confused dying creatures spend their last few moments of life wildly tearing and biting.
Alternatively, the Queenling can elect to emit a scream which sends out a pulse of psychic energy. The power surges like a wave through everything nearby. For the living, it causes organ disruption and internal bleeding. To inorganic matter, cracks and seams appear on the material as it is momentarily destabilized at the atomic level. This attack is indiscriminate damaging all models, friend and foe alike.
All of this serves to showcase the most dangerous and capable unit the Queens have thus far evolved. The Commander model of the Hexagota: the Queenling.
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