Chapter 42
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 42
Chapter Title: Locust (2)
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"Is it... over?"
"We survived this time too. But next time..."
The Golden Mandate Society had dubbed it the Barrier of Hope even before they began building it.
But regardless of their boasts about a sacred crusade unfolding beyond the Inner Lands, the site where the battle had just ended was nothing short of hell itself.
The exhausted soldiers who had barely survived yet another war against the ants stared blankly at the crumbling walls and the piles of corpses, letting out sighs.
The ants' relentless assaults came in waves whenever there was a gap, showing no signs of stopping.
The barrier had never been breached even once in the process, but the mounting casualties were becoming too much to bear.
"Ron! Where are you! Please answer me!"
"Looks like that knight over there got dragged off too, the poor bastard."
A soldier sighed as he watched an elderly knight desperately calling his son's name without even a moment to remove his helmet.
Among the corpses strewn across the ground, the ants seemed to make up the majority, but that was just because their bodies were larger—and because so many corpses had been intentionally dragged away by the ants during the fighting, vanishing without a trace.
Those who were taken like that couldn't even be recovered.
All they knew was that they were hauled off somewhere, torn to shreds, and turned into food for the ants.
"Knights, mages, priests, and so on. Doesn't it seem off? The bodies they take always seem to be..."
"You think so? I heard plenty of regular soldiers' bodies vanished too."
Of course, some had already noticed that the ants were targeting specific individuals.
They hadn't yet realized the ants were devouring them to absorb their power, but with a bit more evidence, it wouldn't be hard to guess.
The Queen foresaw this situation and ordered the hive to drag in large numbers of regular soldiers as well.
But before that could happen, the Queen had already anticipated it.
She added behaviors to deceive and mislead them before they could catch on to their intentions.
In her breeding chamber, the Queen—twitching her antennae in her own room—watched every scene through the hive mind, her tactical thoughts not stopping there.
The Queen thinks that relentlessly pressing the assault like this will prevent the supply of fodder from fulfilling its role.
The Golden Mandate Society, having fully seized the old Carmion Kingdom, was squeezing every resource from it to send to the barrier even now.
But no matter how swiftly they moved after finally solidifying their internal unity, they couldn't outpace the ants.
The ants could instantly morph from larvae into various mutant strains, and their growth time was shortening day by day as the Queen's genetic designs grew more refined.
The Queen worried that if things continued this way, the barrier would collapse before she could harvest as much as she wanted.
Subordinates detect the gift bestowed by the great existence.
But she couldn't weaken the assault on the barrier either. They needed the steady influx of food from there to grow the hive.
As she pondered this, something fell from the sky above the breeding chamber.
The Queen instinctively raised her head.
Whenever a dilemma arose, the heavens watching over them had always provided the answer.
"You got them incredibly fast. I thought these only lived in Africa or South America."
"That's thanks to how the world's changed. Dungeons work like personal warehouses now, and with double gates, you can cross continents like a warp gate."
Jin-hyuk smirked as he looked at the army ants in the test tube.
Just as the supplier said, the world now was vastly different from just a few decades ago.
Jin-hyuk, who vaguely remembered those earlier times despite being young then, nodded in strong agreement.
'Though it'll probably be like this only for now.'
Until recently, the great disaster at age eight had been the biggest turning point in his life.
But not anymore. Now, something was unfolding that went beyond his life as an ordinary person—perhaps tied to the entire world.
The Queen devours new prey and absorbs its abilities.
The army ants Jin-hyuk introduced naturally couldn't stand against his mutant subordinate ants.
The few army ants were torn limb from limb into chunks of meat and fed straight to the Queen.
'Will they really figure out my intent?'
Unlike usual, he watched the Queen's reaction with a tense expression.
Army ants weren't particularly special prey for his ants at this stage of growth.
Their unique organizational strength paled against the complete hive mind his ants possessed.
And individually, no army ant could match ants that had devoured and absorbed abilities from all sorts of insects.
Still, he chose army ants specifically to graft their migratory abilities onto his own.
If his ants gained the power to roam the world without a fixed nest, devouring everything in sight, it would give them options beyond assaulting the southern Carmion Kingdom.
The Queen ponders. Using the newly absorbed ability, she judges she can create another hive and advance much farther.
"Did it work?"
And the Queen grasped his intent perfectly.
It perfectly solved the very issue she'd been mulling over, after all.
Subordinates begin preparations to form a new hive and send it west. The Queen simultaneously starts producing a new spawning queen.
The ants immediately began preparations.
Starting with the Queen incorporating the new ability, they created individuals who could venture far with fresh soldiers.
This was the moment a new sub-hive—the wandering hive—emerged within the greater hive.
"..."
The Queen—now the First Queen, freed from spawning duties to focus solely on the hive's and individuals' evolution—found herself troubled by the production of the individual who would serve as queen for the new hive in her stead.
For the wandering sub-hive designed by the greater hive to function as intended, it needed a new focal point.
A being to oversee and manage the entire sub-hive, just like the First Queen herself.
Of course, this queen wouldn't be exempt from spawning duties like the First Queen.
What irked the First Queen was the idea of granting this successor queen intelligence beyond that of a mere spawning machine.
'Mine...'
She knew all too well what intelligence entailed and its destructive power.
That's why she naturally wanted to monopolize it.
A fierce greed and obsession welled up—something no other ant, acting purely on hive instincts, could ever feel.
What if she gave even a sliver of potential, and the new queen grew in intellect and ability just like her?
But for now, there was no alternative.
In the end, the Queen reluctantly ordered the nest's spawning queen to produce the individual who would become the new hive's queen.
A new queen was born with full, unaltered cognitive growth potential.
Unlike the other queens reduced to mere spawning machines, this was a true "little sister" to succeed the First Queen.
Yet even knowing her rank was unmistakably superior, the First Queen disliked this individual from the start.
'So many nests now. Incredibly fast.'
The time it took for those forming the new hive to be born and mature wasn't long.
Jin-hyuk, who had fully settled and adapted to his new home over the past few days, smirked as he watched the ants emerging one by one from their pupae in such a short time.
Their appearance was nearly identical to the existing ants.
But they all burst from the nest at once, converging in one place.
The nests the ant hive had established across the northern lands—now cleared of former powers—were too numerous to count on one hand.
The massive horde pouring out from those nests formed a colossal hive starting with tens of thousands of ants.
Subordinates begin the great migration. Their target: the orcs of the western great plains, vividly etched in the hive's memory.
The ants had created this new hive from the start to hunt orcs.
They were one of the few enemy hives the ants knew of at their current level.
To face the sturdy warrior race of orcs, they'd increased numbers of mutant soldier ants akin to heavily armored tanks, and mixed in plenty with scouting abilities absorbed for mobility that wouldn't lag behind.
"Those bastards... no way!"
"Monsters! Monsters from the east!"
The orc settlements on the great plains, which had spent tense days without clashes since the Eastern Union's destruction, were stunned by the horde swarming across the vast flatlands without warning.
In the wake of that black tide, no sizable lifeforms survived—only plants the ants ignored and tiny critters too small to bother eating.
Nothing larger remained.
To sustain such a massive horde without farming, the wandering hive had to become an incarnation of destruction.
"We have to retreat. We're just a hundred strong. We can't stop them!"
"But retreating all together means we'll all die."
The orc settlement unluckily caught first in their detection net descended into chaos.
No settlement of just a few hundred could hold off that horde.
The shamans hurriedly prepared for retreat, loading tribesmen, goods, and livestock onto land shards.
But the ants charging at them now were different from before.
They boasted swarms of mutants faster than the horses humans rode or the great prairie wolves orcs mounted.
"We'll hold them. Even a split second buys time to save one more life."
Some warriors volunteered for sacrifice—a common occurrence among quarrelsome orc tribes.
In such a situation, it was the honorable act of a true warrior.
"Let us salute our great warriors."
At the shaman's words, the speechless tribesmen bowed their heads.
The mood grew solemn even in the urgency, as it meant accepting death.
"Charge. Every minute we buy lets our comrades and families escape."
The orc warrior Dur led his fellow volunteers, weapons in hand, rushing forward.
He'd already abandoned any thought of survival. He just wanted to buy that fleeting moment.
'Surely He is watching!'
Dur's tribe were subordinates of the deity Urmark, inspired by his faith.
One power Urmark granted was the Heart of Battle, amplifying orcs' demonic power—but only for proven warriors.
Even if he himself didn't survive, if the great deity witnessed this and rewarded his family or tribe, Dur would deem it enough.
"Kill!"
Raising his voice to boost morale, he spurred his wolf faster, charging with his few comrades against foes numbering tens, no, thousands of times their number.
The plan was to swerve just before collision, shake off pursuit, and lure them away. Difficult, but it had to be done.
'I'll cleave these ones in one stroke!'
A swarm of swift gale ants—bragging superior speed—rushed to meet them head-on first.
Dur planned to slash them down and turn aside.
"...Huh?"
But just before impact, Dur noticed something off about the oncoming foes.
A pair of enormous scythe claws on the ants' backs unfurled like wings, lunging in an instant to engulf his startled body.