Free Web NovelChapter 20: What the Hell Was Wrong With Those Ants?
A full day on the road. Like after the last dungeon, we’d run it without stopping, despite the previous day’s fighting.
By nightfall, we were there. A wide entrance, but carved into the ground this time, like a crater someone had drilled.
Elsa didn’t give us the chance to catch our breath. She sent us straight down, without so much as a word about the dungeon, unlike last time.
Same as before, a single sword and two torches for all our gear, we descended the slope of the pit, plus a pack Alice carried.
I opened my Eye. The mana here was thicker than in the slime dungeon, but far thinner than at the castle. Less noxious. Less demonic, that was the word for it.
We followed the path, and it wasn’t long before we ran into the first group.
Ants. The size of tigers.
They hadn’t seen us yet. I signaled Alice to back off; she nodded, and we retreated without a sound until we were out of range.
"This dungeon must be home to ant-type monsters," I said under my breath. "I’ve never read anything about them, I don’t know a thing. But maybe we can work out what they can do from the ones we know back on Earth."
Alice nodded, then added, "The way I see it, what’s going to matter most here is the terrain. It’s probably no accident it’s a hole in the ground. Picture it being like a giant anthill."
That wasn’t a bad thought. Not a bad thought at all.
"And if they’re digging constantly, it’s basically a living maze that rewrites itself. They could take us from behind, burst out of a wall that wasn’t there a second earlier."
"This is shaping up to be complicated," I said, thinking it over. Then I went on, "And if on top of that there are several types of ant, upgraded versions, like with the slimes, we could end up in real trouble."
We stayed on that a while. Then I asked the other question, the one that had been nagging at me for some time.
"Tell me... do you have other spells besides the ones you’ve shown me recently? Things you’re keeping from me, like the shield."
She seemed to hesitate, then answered.
"Just one. Training with lightning magic, from stimulating my own body with it over and over, I unlocked a skill. [Nerves of Light — Lv. 1]. It lets me do a few things: stimulate the nervous system and reflexes, suppress pain. But I can only cast it on someone I’m touching."
"I see... So it won’t be much use to us here."
She raised a finger, with that very particular expression she got when some slightly mad idea crossed her mind.
"What if we stayed pressed together?"
"Don’t start with your—"
"No, really, Kuro, hear me out." She was off now. "If I ride on your back, we move much faster, at your pace. I can stimulate both our brains at once if things go bad. You don’t have to be paranoid about an ant catching me from behind, because I’m right against you. And I can watch your blind spots while you fight."
The moment any option involved the two of us staying glued together, she suddenly became frighteningly clever, I thought, smiling in spite of myself.
"All right. Let’s do that."
She climbed onto my back, and surprise caught me: I felt no weight at all. One more proof that I had nothing left of the human I’d been a few weeks earlier. The levels, the stats climbing, the skills — all of it was turning me into someone else.
The only thing that threw me off was her heavy chest rolling against my back with every step.
"Everything okay?" Alice asked.
"Yeah... yeah."
And I took off, faster.
The moment we came back on the group, Alice murmured in my ear, in a voice far more sensual than the situation called for, "Sacred Surge." The warmth of the buff poured into my limbs along with a shiver that had nothing to do with the fight, and it threw me off more than it should have. I opened my Eye of Infinity, and I charged.
The ants saw me coming and threw themselves at me in turn, quick, frantic. They didn’t walk — they lunged, mandibles open, hooked legs raking the dirt, climbing over one another in their rush to reach me. The first dropped on me from the left; I pivoted, water trailing my blade in a long ribbon, and opened its flank between two plates of carapace. Black juice sprayed, and it collapsed on its own legs.
I didn’t stop. I didn’t need to. That was the heady part — my body went where my Eye looked, without that half-beat of lag that had cost me so many blows against Elsa. A mandible snapped shut where my head had been; I was already elsewhere, slipping between two attackers, and my blade took one of them on the way past. On my back, Alice matched my every move, light as nothing, her chin near my shoulder, and I could hear her tracking the fight.
"Behind you, on the right," she breathed, calm.
I didn’t have to check. I sent the water out in a low arc without even turning my head, and felt the soft resistance of a carapace giving way. Fighting with her strapped to me should have hampered me, weighed me down, thrown off my balance. It was the opposite. She covered what I couldn’t see, and all I had to do was dance.
And they fell. One after another, in pieces, without a single one managing to lay a mandible on me. For monsters the size of tigers, they died with an almost embarrassing ease. Probably the weakest this dungeon had to offer, I thought — because it was hard to believe all the rest would be this simple.
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> Level 26 — Path of the Spellblade applied
We pressed on. Along the way, we ran into the exact same kind of small group again and again, and each time I won without difficulty.
"They’re workers," Alice whispered in my ear, the way she had since climbing onto my back. "They all follow the same pattern."
She was right. And the conclusion was that these ants the size of tigers weren’t really fighters at all.
We spent a few more hours slaughtering workers in the tunnels that sank ever deeper. My levels eventually stopped climbing: I was level 31 now. I told Alice. She, on her end, had just hit level 25.
We decided to stop for a few hours. Alice pulled the same little runic stove from her usual pack and made a simple meal. While she cooked, I planted torches here and there around the area, so we’d have better visibility during our watches.
While it cooked, I finally opened my status. I hadn’t looked at it in detail since the camp, and with all those levels, I was curious.
[ STATUS ]
Name: Kuro Shiragi | Race: Human | Class: Hero of the Infinite | Level: 31
[ Stats ]
Strength 60 | Vitality 49 | Agility 83 | Mana 74 | Intelligence 50 | Perception 54
Free points: 18
Eighteen free points waiting. And the rest had climbed almost on its own, just by following the Path of the Spellblade I’d chosen: agility and mana racing ahead at every level, strength and perception trailing behind. Numbers I wouldn’t even have dared write for one of my own heroes a few weeks back, for fear of being told I was rushing it.
I lingered a moment on the mana line. Seventy-four. A few weeks earlier it had capped at seventeen, and I’d rationed every drop like a miser, terrified of running dry mid-fight. Not anymore. Between the Path swelling it at every level and Apotheosis regenerating it continuously as long as I stayed on my feet, I no longer had to count. I could flood an entire corridor without a second thought, chain Dashes, let the Dance flow without end. My magic was no longer a reserve I scraped at: it was an open tap. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
As for the eighteen points, I left them where they were. There was no rush, and I’d just as soon wait until I had a better read on this dungeon before deciding where to pour them. I closed the window.
After the meal, Alice told me she’d of course taken the mana-related path. With that, she’d become an outright magic monster within a few levels — as if she weren’t already enough of one.
We rested a few hours, each taking a turn, a habit we were starting to settle into for good.
Then we set off again, working through the groups as the corridors went by. We eventually came out into wider galleries. And there, facing us, different ants.
At the back, two larger, longer ants, tipped with a kind of scorpion tail raised and aimed at us. In front of them, a group of ordinary workers. The whole thing arranged as if we were expected — and that, I didn’t like. But there was something else. Among the workers, my Eye picked out one whose mana didn’t look like the others’. I noted it, and charged.
I launched myself, and the gallery erupted.
At the back, the two artillery ants reared up on their hind legs and their tails spat. Two blocks of ice shot out, head-sized, whistling through the cramped air. My Eye traced their line before they reached me; I threw myself aside, and they shattered against the wall in a burst of frozen shards, exactly where I’d been about to pass.
"Two more, on the left!" Alice called against my ear — she saw them recharging before I did, and I corrected my course without even thinking.
But the workers wouldn’t let me run straight. They flung themselves across my path, throwing themselves in front of the shots, in front of my blade, a living wall of carapaces and mandibles with one purpose: to slow me down long enough for the tails to catch me. The first cut off my route; I split it in two with a backhand of water without breaking stride. Another lunged at my legs, and I crushed it under a heel before vaulting over its corpse.
A block of ice came in from the right, outside my angle. I didn’t see it. Alice did.
"Lightning!"
A bolt cracked over my shoulder and pulverized the projectile in midair, a rain of sleet falling on the back of my neck. I had no time to thank her; two workers were already leaping at me head-on. I slid between them, water coiling around the blade, and opened them both on the way through without slowing, gaining ground meter by meter toward the gunners at the back.
They realized I was breaking through. One of the two lowered its tail and aimed it straight at me, point-blank —
I Dashed. I reappeared at its flank, and before it had pivoted, my water-charged blade sheared its tail off at the base. The block of ice lodged itself in the ceiling. The second artillery ant backed away, panicked, and the workers surged toward it to cover it.
That was when my Eye isolated her. A worker, in the middle of the others, whose mana didn’t resemble theirs — denser, more unstable, gathered in the hollow of her abdomen like a clenched fist. Watch out for that one. I rushed her, and split her with my sword.
Her mana flared. I saw it. My Eye screamed it at me.
Alice seemed to feel it too. She spoke two words, very fast: "Nerves of Light."
And everything sped up.
The world slowed around me. I saw the mana gather at the ant’s center, compress in a fraction of a second, to the breaking point. I saw the blast before it existed. And thanks to my thoughts, now magnified tenfold, I had time to speak as fast as I could.
"Dash."
I found myself ten meters back. The explosion ravaged the spot where I’d stood a second earlier, shook the tunnel, rained dirt from the ceiling — and swept the still-living ants around it into the blast.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 32 — Path of the Spellblade applied
"Fuck. Goddamn kamikaze ants."
Behind me, Alice started laughing. The tension breaking, probably.
"Ahaha... what the hell is this, Kuro? That little bastard ant just literally blew itself up, do you realize that?"
I started laughing with her, unable to stop.
"It was completely insane. The heroes of humanity, killed by a kamikaze ant."
She burst into laughter against my back.
"I’d pay to see Elsa report that back to the king."
We laughed like that for a good while. It was the first time since we’d arrived in this world that we’d let go so completely — a real fit of laughter, all the built-up tension giving way at once.
And then, after a moment, far behind us in the gloom, a murderous aura rose. An aura we knew all too well. Elsa, of course.
My body froze, Alice’s too, against my back. I caught myself at once: the fear that woman inspired in me killed any urge to keep going.
"Hmm... What do you say we get back on our way, Alice?"
"That’s exactly what I was about to suggest."
