Chapter 191: Ant Nest
Ren didn’t go back in that night.
Knowing a technique and owning it were two different things — and right now his arsenal was mostly the first kind. Outside of Last Pyre and the Heavenpiercer Art — both stamped straight into his bones by the enlightenments — everything else was just knowledge sitting in his head, unpracticed. Unpracticed knowledge got people killed in places like the one waiting behind the arch. So he made the boring, correct choice: the rest of the night for the veil and the defensive arts, the morning for the two attack arts, and the afternoon for running them all together until they stopped being separate things and started being how he moved.
His world made a mockery of normal training time, and OPTIMIZE had already tuned every one of them to his exact body. By late afternoon, the panel had the receipts.
[SKILLS UPDATED:]
[GHOSTVEIL ART — CONCEALMENT (PROFICIENT).]
[TITANHIDE ART — DEFENSE (PROFICIENT).]
[STONEWALL ART — DEFENSE (PROFICIENT).]
[AEGIS ART — DEFENSE (PROFICIENT).]
[STORMSEVER ART — AREA ATTACK (PROFICIENT).]
[METEORFALL ART — IMPACT ATTACK (PROFICIENT).]
[HEAVENPIERCER ART — BLADE ATTACK (MASTER).]
[LAST PYRE — SECRET TECHNIQUE (MASTER).]
Proficient — half of a technique’s true potential, on the old four-step ladder every academy student memorized: Beginner a quarter, Proficient half, Expert three-quarters, Master all of it. Half would do for now. Practice got a skill this far; real combat pushed it faster than any training room ever could. And where he was going, there would be no shortage of real combat.
While he toweled off, one loose end from the garden floated back up. He’d asked the general about armor too, at the end — it had seemed reasonable, given his week. Halvern had waved it off without even pausing: his personalized set was already waiting at Sovereign Dawn, part of the champion’s package from the Cup, forged to his exact measurements when he arrived. Anything off a rack now would be a downgrade he’d throw away in a month. Fair enough. Until then, apparently, his armor plan was ’don’t get hit,’ reinforced by five-times ’don’t get hit.’
He ate, rested an hour, and stood in front of the grey arch as the light outside went gold.
The Ghostveil went on first, wrapped as deep as Proficient could take it — presence, sound, scent, signature, all of it smoothed down to nothing. The Titanhide hummed to life underneath, cheap and steady, the way he’d built it to be. Two revives sat in the bank, reset with the morning.
’Round two.’ He stepped through.
— • —
No mantis. No shrimp. Nothing.
Ren stood dead still just inside the arch, eyes working the grey plain in slow sections. He found rocks, cracks, mist — and not one living thing anywhere near the door. He let out a breath. So his luck was capable of normal. Good to know the universe had a setting between blessed and personally offended.
He picked a direction he hadn’t died in yet and walked, quiet as a hole in the world.
The first contact came twenty minutes in — a shape trundling between boulders on six legs. Ren’s brain needed a second to accept the scale of it. It was an ant. It was also the size of a horse. Grey rock armor over a black body, the same strange thin lines running across every plate, and a set of pincers that curved like twin sabers, their edges shading into a deep, dark red. The lines and the red caught what little light the mist let through, and the overall effect was — he could admit it — less dreadful, more cool.
It hadn’t seen him. It hadn’t sensed him. The veil held, and this time, before anything else, he used the scan like a person with a functioning survival instinct.
[SCAN: ASHPLATE ANT — WORKER.]
[CULTIVATION: ?]
[DANGER TO HOST: LOW.]
Ren sighed in relief, and the relief had two layers. LOW meant he could take it — which meant the mantis and the shrimp really had been bad luck, not the baseline. Day one hadn’t proven the whole world outclassed him; it had proven the door liked dropping him next to monsters. The second layer was quieter and stranger: the question mark. The System could read the cultivation of anything on Edius down to the decimal. These things? It filed them under a shrug. Foreign world, foreign ladder — even his cheat was reading them through fog.
’Later,’ he decided. ’Mystery later. Test now.’
He moved from rock to rock, closing the gap with the veil wrapped tight, and the ant just kept trundling, oblivious, even when he was near enough to count the lines on its armor. Then he poured energy down his right arm until his hand was an edge, broke from cover at a full sprint, and swung.
The Heavenpiercer Art went through the rock plate like it wasn’t a topic worth discussing. One slash, head sliced in half, and the ant folded up mid-step and was still. Penetration had been the correct choice; the armor that had shrugged at his old arsenal’s logic simply wasn’t consulted this time.
Ren stood over his first kill in Insectoid World 1, listened to the plain stay silent, and allowed himself one small, professional nod. Then he put a palm on the carcass and dropped the whole thing into his storage. Rare or not, it was material from another world — the grafting question alone made it worth keeping, and he wasn’t leaving free resources on the ground.
— • —
The next few hours turned into the strangest, most satisfying work shift of his life.
The ants were everywhere once he learned to look — singles wandering between rock fields, pairs, little knots of three and four working at cracks in the ground like they were mining something. Ren worked the plain like a ghost with a quota: veil, approach, scan to confirm it was a worker, one Heavenpiercer through the head, storage. Anything gathered five or more, he gave a wide, polite berth and went looking for smaller math. No heroics. He’d done his heroics on day one, twice, and both times someone had had to catch him in the grass.
The count climbed. Five. Nine. Fourteen. His storage was slowly filling with a small cavalry of dead ants, and somewhere around number ten the pattern behind them clicked into place — the wanderers weren’t wandering. Their paths bent, all of them, around the same distant stretch of broken ground to the north, in and out, like traffic. Workers, running supply lines.
’It’s a colony,’ he thought. ’I’m not hunting monsters. I’m poaching somebody’s employees.’
He was still deciding how he felt about that when he met the manager.
It came around a ridge of rock on a patrol line — and it was ant the way the workers were ant, and then very much more. Three times their size, plate thicker and darker, a single blunt horn crowning its head, pincers less like sabers and more like siege shears. The strange lines on its armor ran deeper, and the red of it was almost black.
Ren froze behind his boulder and scanned it.
[SCAN: ASHPLATE ANT — SOLDIER.]
[CULTIVATION: ?]
[DANGER TO HOST: HIGH.]
The smart move was to fade backward and keep farming workers. He knew that. He even started to — and then stopped, because there was a piece of information he needed more than he needed a clean day: how big the gap actually was. Workers were LOW. The apex, whenever he found it, would be something far past this thing. If HIGH meant a hard fight, the month had a plan. If HIGH meant a wall, the plan needed to change now, not at the bottom of the colony.
One revive in the bank. The veil holding. The same opening that had worked fourteen times.
He broke from cover exactly as before — full sprint, edge leading, everything he had behind one perfect first strike at the joint of neck and plate.
He’d give himself this much afterward: it was a good hit. The Heavenpiercer bit — and skidded, the horn-plate flexing under it, deep enough to wound and nowhere near enough to end. Then the soldier turned faster than three tons of anything should turn, and Ren got approximately two seconds of the rest of the fight. He spent one of them blocking a pincer that hit like a falling building, Titanhide and all, and the other learning that soldiers didn’t need a second swing.
The grass caught him.
He lay under the Worldroot, shaking through the pain of death number three, while Kaia’s warmth rolled over him with the weary patience of someone whose person kept coming home like this. And when his breath evened out, the first thing he said to the empty air was, ’I saw it this time.’
Progress. Genuinely. He’d seen it, fought it, and could name what killed him — worker farming was safe, soldiers were a wall, and his one perfect opening bought a wound instead of a kill anywhere above LOW. That was real information, paid for at the usual rate.
He stared up through the branches, cataloging the day: fourteen dead workers in storage, one revive left, one colony to the north with traffic lines and a soldier patrol and thicker plate the deeper it went.
’Workers,’ he thought. ’Soldiers over them. And somewhere down under all that broken ground — whatever wears the crown.’
He really, really hoped it wasn’t a shrimp.