“Are you ready, my sisters?” she demanded of the waiting armoured troops. “Are you prepared for the fire that is to come?”
“YES!” they roared as they slapped their antennae against their armour.
“Will your charge never falter? Will you crush the ranks of the enemy?”
“YES!”
“Will you fight until you collapse? Will you fight until the last breath leaves your body?”
“YES!”
“Then, when you are engulfed in cursed flame, will you rise? Will you do it all over again?”
“YES!”
“WHY?” she roared, her pheromones billowing around her.
“WE SEEK!”
“WHAT YOU SEARCH FOR IS OUT THERE! IN THE MASSED RANKS OF THE TERMITE, YOU CAN FIND YOUR REST! GO AND TAKE IT!”
“WE SEEK!”
With that final, suffocating roar, the Immortals began to advance. There were almost two hundred of them now, each tier five or six, each armoured in a custom, fully enchanted suit of the finest armour the Colony could provide. Every individual represented multiple tons of pure, righteous ant fury. Their charge began as a walk, the armoured column moving in lockstep, the tread of their six legs shaking the ground as they moved as one.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
At the head of the column, the rhythmic drumming of their steps matched the urgent beat of Leeroy’s heart. Every time she had sortied over the last weeks, the battle had been desperate and they’d been pushed right to the brink before being pulled back.
So close.
She’d been so close! The glorious, blazing and climactic end that she’d yearned for from the moment she’d hatched had been within her reach numerous times. Even now, the scent of desperate battle hung heavy in the air. The acrid tang of formic acid, the bitter waft of ichor, and the meaty iron of fresh Biomass washed against her antennae as the battle drew closer. Her eyes burned with passion. As she’d told the others, it was out there. They just had to find it.
Leeroy picked up the pace. No longer a stately march, she accelerated to a quicker gait, her legs beginning to eat up the ground, and the column behind her rose to match her pace. No longer did their tread create a steady beat; the noise had elevated to a constant rumble, more like an avalanche building in the distance than troops on the march.
Soon, they saw the battle lines up ahead. A horde of ravening termites threatened to overwhelm the ant defenders through sheer weight of numbers. A desperate struggle had broken out, the Colony fighting to retreat as termite reinforcements poured from a tunnel in the wall.
Another breach. The ka’armodo were cunning, and their mastery of magic was beyond what the Colony could manage. Using their unknown methods, they’d been able to guide their insect slaves through twisted and convoluted paths in the rock, evading detection and penetrating deep into ant territory. The breaches could happen almost anywhere at any time, tunnels crashing open and vomiting thousands of enemy combatants behind the main lines. For this reason, the Immortals had been stationed as the rapid-response force.
As always, the sight of the hated enemy ignited a primal rage in her gut, and Leeroy embraced it. Their elongated mandibles, their strange, alien bodies, with only two segments rather than three, and their beady, near-sightless eyes. They were unnatural and did not belong in this world. She firmly believed that; how else could she explain this instinctual hatred?
With a flick of her antenna, the entire Immortal column accelerated to full speed. The avalanche was no longer in the distance, now it was right here, and the ground trembled under the force of their charge.
Leeroy activated her Skills, accelerating beyond what she was normally capable of as her Dash and Charge Skills combined to elevate her speed. The tunnel even sloped downhill, perfect conditions.
With the Immortals rushing in, the still-battling ants scrambled to disengage and get out of the way, unleashing potent blasts of acid and mana to create whatever distance they could before the steel phalanx that was the Immortals reached them.
These were the moments that Leeroy lived for. Her soul was on fire. The ranks of the enemy grew larger and larger in her vision as she lowered her head and prepared to meet them, the ground blurring beneath her.
The moment of impact was like the detonation of an explosion.
An inrush of air.
The deadly silence.
And then the deafening crash. The shockwave swept through her body as her armour crumpled, the termite before her vanishing as the sheer force of her mass sent it flying back into the massed ranks of its allies. What did she care for ranks? What did she care for the new tactics of the enemy? The Immortals did not acknowledge such things.
Their charge continued as their legs pounded the ground, urging every bit of speed possible. They smashed through line after line of the enemy, squashing them beneath their claws, breaking their carapaces upon their armour.
Finally, their momentum slowed, the charge ground to a halt, and still there were termites in front of her.
Leeroy clacked her mandibles with joy.
“There’s still plenty left!” she cried. “Rejoice, my sisters!”
And there were. The termites continued to flood from the tunnel before them, the lines reforming as they closed around the Immortal column.
And the ants rejoiced.
112. Colony vs Colony, Part 5
The grind of an ongoing melee was a very different type of combat than the thrilling and domineering charge of the Immortals. The mass that propelled them through the ranks of the enemy now bore down on their backs. Leeroy welcomed it. It had taken her a long time to grow accustomed to fighting with a second shell, but once she did, once her armour-wearing Skill had risen to a sufficient rank, she came to understand its power.
The jaws of the termite foe, long, curved, and sharp beyond belief, were designed to find the weak points of an insect carapace, the joints between body segments, and sever them brutally. For the Immortals, such weaknesses did not exist. The joints that connected their head, abdomen, and thorax were heavily protected by layers of enchanted and hardened metal that defied even the potent mandibles of their enemies.
The Immortals had no powerful magic. They could not blast with fire, or ice, or blow powerful gusts of air that would scatter their enemy. Nor did they have powerful streams of acid that would melt their enemies by the dozen. Their mutations and evolutions had driven them in a different direction, and it was on those strengths they now relied.
Their enlarged heads held dense muscles that powered their long, compounded mandibles, and they leveraged those with devastating bites. Their legs were specially evolved and mutated to hold their immense weight and drive bursts of speed that allowed them to initiate small charges when given a breath of space.
Though they couldn’t reach full speed, these smaller charges allowed them to throw their weight around, bashing into the termites, shattering formations, and cracking their shells, creating weak points they could exploit.
Fighting in close quarters with Leeroy and her followers was like a human trying to contain a miniature Vibrant in their hand. Painful.
They bashed and crashed, bit and scrapped, stepping over the fallen and broken bodies of their opponents as yet more emerged from the hole in the tunnel wall to take up the fight.