The Mana Tear deals with oodles of different conditions brought on by fact, misconception and fiction of the greater outside world. There is a full functioning world outside of the Mana Tear that occasionally inflects purely fictional effects brought by the outside world. Robotic hives exist in many different niches though the most common traits lead to them being placed by high on threat/enemy lists: mostly the assimilation tendencies. Most "Drone" hives are limited by the material they use to create agents and transform spellfluxed. Hives that don't have a reasonable material limitation tend to get exploded with exceptional priority by the governing bodies of the Mana Tear.

If a hive over expands it tends to collapse and cannibalize itself, this mostly prevents a hive from hitting critical mass and consuming the entire landmass. This happens because the controlling intelligence cannot reign in so many distinct minds of the spellfluxed, even if the hive is aware of this and they KILL spellfluxed they won't stay dead and will assume control of the agents the hive has gradually over time; which contaminates their hivemind once more.

Here we have Nicole turned into a Vulcan Automata which is one of the most benign robotic shapes within the Mana Tear, which specifically has an opt-in network for the hive. She is just happy she wasn't nabbed by a full drone hive, that would have been a wasted couple weeks as she wrestled control of herself back from the hive.