Four stars. The title translates to “Her Majesty’s Swarm” (supposedly; I don’t see the word “isekai” in there).

Our protagonist is an eighteen-year-old Japanese recluse who spends her days playing a strategy game set in a fantasy world. She’s particularly fond of the evil faction, one focused on “zerg rushing” with a horde of spiderlike monsters. Anyway, one random day, she either dies or just arbitrarily gets transported to a fantasy world (all these isekai stories are blending together).

She finds herself as the real-life queen of a horde of spiderlike monsters, the same kind that she commanded to victory in the game. They operate as a hive mind, and she quickly realizes that with herself set at the middle of that web of consciousnesses, she may end up dissolving into the collective.

After an encounter with some local elves, she discovers that this world has never seen monsters like the ones she commands: she hasn’t only been transported to a fantasy world, but to one where her own game faction doesn’t belong.

What should be her goal in this fantasy world, where she has no business existing? She figures that she may as well focus on the same goal she pursued in the game: absolute victory. But is such a victory palatable when she’s going to look into the eyes of the people she’s supposed to slaughter?

The protagonist struggles to retain her humanity by dividing the world into victims and oppressors. She refuses to unleash her horde of spider monsters into someone merely because they annoyed her or because it would be convenient. However, one day, a neighboring country makes the regrettable mistake of fucking with her, and for the spider queen who increasingly cares less about losing herself to the collective insectlike hunger, that means one thing: a genocidal war that won’t spare even children.

Apart from the protagonist, the only other main person the reader could connect with is the queen’s spawned hero unit, her sole knight, a devoted half-woman half-spider who is more than eager to slaughter every single living thing in her path as long as her queen demands it. I found her quite enjoyable.

This story, determined to pull a “downfall” kind of arc for her initially normal protagonist, pushes us to empathize with the hapless human inhabitants of the kingdom that finds itself in the crosshairs of the horde. They’re a zealous bunch that believe themselves under the protection of a god of light, and they actually are, since their higher-ups can summon angels at will; they nonchalantly show up from the heavens to try to save the day. While bigoted against any infidel and heretic, their perspective allows the reader to feel the absolute horror of facing an onslaught of previously unknown monsters rushing through your lands, consuming everything and everyone in their path.

I found the ending quite haunting. In general, this shortish story (around forty chapters) left me feeling a bit ill, I don’t know if it was the constant gore, the extreme hopelessness of it all, that something I ate didn’t agree with my stomach, or a combination of such factors. I do recommend this story, but I vastly prefer isekai in which the protagonist has a good time without attempting to ruin the world in the process.