133. Colony vs Colony, Part 7
Full of vim and vigour, we dash off to find Sarah toiling away helping to build walls. The great bear isn’t much for digging, lacking an ants’ zen-like disposition toward it, or our powerful mandibles. You’d think hands would be great for shifting dirt, but nope, mandibles is where it’s at. The two face-hands are excellent for both cutting into the unyielding rock and gathering up loose soil into a clump.
[Hey, Sarah!]
[Anthony? You’re back already?]
[Yep! Ready to throw myself into unspeakable danger in the hopes of bringing a swifter conclusion to the war. You want in?]
The great bear slowly blinks a few times.
[You want me to join you on one of your crazy suicide missions.]
[Why not? You make it sound like something a person wouldn’t want to do.]
[Anthony, a normal person absolutely wouldn’t want to do that.]
[Bah! Who cares about normal people? I don’t see any of them around here. All I see are the greatest and most incredible ant that ever crawled, and a gigantic, badass bear of doom. What do you say?]
She thinks about it for a long moment before she nods. [Okay. I’ll do it.]
[Wait, really?] I’m shocked. [I thought for sure you’d say no. I was only inviting you to be friendly.]
[You invite people on suicide missions, just to be friendly? Actually, it doesn’t matter. I want to help. I want to end this war before it gets out of hand. Then, hopefully, we get some rest and the Colony can have peace.]
It’s a great thought, but I don’t want to tell her that it’s highly unlikely to happen. Even after the termites are dealt with, we still have a burgeoning conflict with the ka’armodo, the worrying demon movements to stress about, and the industriousness of the Colony itself. Even without foes pushing against us, the Colony will always keep growing outward until it hits boundaries.
With our expansion in the third underway, it’s only a matter of time until we get started on the fourth. As I understand it, free real estate is hard to come by down here.
With Sarah recruited, it’s time.
We stride past layers of entrenched defences as we make our way to the main tunnel connecting the Colony on the path to the termite mound. I don’t intend to pull any tricks. We are going straight into the heart of the enemy formation.
With a little luck, they’ll come for us and we can hold out long enough for the Colony to take advantage and punch some deep holes in the encirclement.
Complicated plans aren’t for me. I’ll drive forward, make as much of a mess as I can, and count on much smarter minds to make something good out of it.
As we keep moving, the silent ant guardians watch us with their unblinking eyes until we leave the last wall behind. My antennae wave constantly as I take the lead, feeling my way along in search for traps. The stink of termite is constant in this section of tunnel, their filthy trails clinging to the rock.
It’s dead silent, and dark, but that isn’t enough to hide from me.
The ebb and flow of mana has never been clearer to me than it is now. I can see the currents, the tiny shifts and ripples, better than I ever could before. There are literally hundreds of thousands of monsters swarming around these tunnels, and the effect they have on the mana flow is considerable.
More than that, so many chunky insects is like lighting a beacon to my antennae. The faint pulses of gravity send a tingling sensation running down the twilight filament. I can feel them, and they’re close.
[Get ready, gang, they’re coming for us,] I warn the others.
Tiny’s eyes blaze with inner fire as electricity begins to ripple across his fur. From the back of my carapace, Crinis begins to extend her tendrils, manifesting her body in increments. Invidia’s eye blazes with green light, and the air splits open, revealing his enormous cheshire grin.
In the distance, a light tik-tak sound can be heard echoing off the stone walls. Quickly, the sound builds, until the insistent clacking of claws is all around us.
My brains skip into overdrive, working mana furiously, preparing a variety of delights for the oncoming termite swarm.
The first termite rounds the corner, and promptly has its face blasted in by a searing bolt of lightning. I look at Tiny, irritated, and he grins back, his entire body alight with crackling power.
134. Colony vs Colony, Part 8
What is given to us when a monster dies by our hand? Experience. This is the benediction of the System, a gift which allows us to grow, to uplift ourselves. Every monster slain is a single brick in the Path that we tread to achieve our perfect self. Since the Divine Descent, when the System made itself known to us, this has been our manifest destiny.
Yet there are questions. How can we best apply ourselves as we walk together on this road? Is there a way that we may devote ourselves more ardently, pursue our purpose more completely?
The great Church of the Path has devoted itself to these questions for thousands of years, desperate to seek a more complete truth.
When a monster is slain, we grow from the gift of life that we have taken, and lay claim to a portion of the experience within the beast. But what of the rest? The experience gained is but a tiny fraction of that possessed by the fallen foe. How can we allow this Holy Sacrament to be squandered in such a way? It’s an unthinkable heresy, akin to scattering the Divine upon the ground like rubbish.
Due to the unceasing labour of the faithful, we have been able to ensure our strides are longer, our steps firmer, as we walk along the Path.
Let none of the harvest go to waste. What the Divine has sowed, we shall reap in full.
Where one termite goes, many more are sure to follow, and it doesn’t take long to prove this maxim correct. After Tiny egregiously annihilated the first termite to show itself, another rounds the corner, followed by another, then another. The tick-tack clack of claws on stone continues to build as thousands of insectoid enemies converge on our location, their mandibles flexing with hunger for ant flesh.
I can feel them all, the micro-disturbances in the planet’s gravitational field are all I need to feel out their locations and general numbers. There’s a lot of them, but we didn’t come to play around.
[No restrictions today,] I tell my crew. [Everyone goes full force from the drop. If a lizard pops its stupid head out, you have my permission to lop it off.]
[Yesssssssssssssss!]
[SMASH!]
[As you wish, Master.]
Like an ethereal engine of destruction, my mind constructs churn hard, heating up my brains as a dozen strings of mana rise under my command. The mana flows and Force Mana falls into the waiting hands of constructs that weave and fold the energy into spears of pure force.
Force Mana is effectively the conversion of magic energy into kinetic energy, and I’ve been using it to punch my opponents about the place. A Force Bolt is a little ball of condensed kinetic energy, and I’ve been piffing them all over the place like magical baseballs, but really, I should have been using spears from the start. Why punch someone, when you can stab?
The spears take shape six at a time, and I fling them at the encroaching termites the moment they’re ready. Just for good measure, I also unload a steady stream of acid.
POW! POW! POW!
Potent acid that cannot compare to the piddling stuff I was born with launches through the air, sizzling harshly as it contacts the enemy. Take that, you damn termites! There’s plenty more where that came from!