Poisonous Insect Valley 3
A vast basin blanketed in a dense red carpet.
In the dying light of dusk, the ants’ crimson chitin glittered and threw back the glow of the sunset. It looked for all the world like an armored army that had settled in for the night—and watching the red mass at the center slowly swell like a rolling snowball made it plain that, with the sun beginning to sink, the ants were raising a temporary encampment.
Some ants even knit their own bodies together to form those temporary billets: living barricades of chitin and crushing mandibles.
Only after I laid eyes on that colossal colony did the events of the past few days finally make sense. If a swarm like that had scoured the land, of course nothing else—no insects, no small beasts—would remain on the ground. Even in my previous life I had read that when this species marched through, every insect and small animal in its path vanished completely, as though the earth itself had been sterilized. That was why the local peoples, strangely enough, were said to welcome these ants. A tide of predation that could devour more than a hundred thousand insects in a single day of travel—that was what their migration meant.
So-ryong, do you know what kind of demonic insects these are? I’ve never seen them even in the Tang clan’s records. This is a first for me as well.
While I was still staring, half-stunned by their sheer grandeur, Grandfather approached with a startled look and sent the question by sound transmission. I nodded and whispered back.
Ants that race madly by day and cluster together by night into temporary camps. Far larger than any ants I had known in my past life, fiercely aggressive, and never builders of permanent nests—wanderers, all of them. There was a name that covered the type.
Army ants.
This had to be a massive colony of army ants.
Yes. I’ve never seen them this size, but these are almost certainly army demonic insects.
Army demonic insects?
Demonic insects that never settle, that roam the way an army marches.
They did not wander constantly. In ordinary times they lived in a sedentary phase in one place; only when food grew scarce did they begin these migrations. They had almost certainly been living here in Poisonous Insect Valley, and for some reason their numbers had ballooned until there was no longer enough to eat—so the nomadic phase had begun.
Then the complete absence of animals was…?
Probably because of them. Anything caught in their march wouldn’t leave so much as a bone behind. We should fall back. They’re extremely aggressive—
Army ants were, by nature, highly belligerent. Whatever appeared in front of the column was usually swept away. I was suggesting we withdraw and had already begun to edge backward when it happened.
Crack!
The sound of a snapping branch. I turned my head. One of the warriors behind us was staring down in pure dismay at the broken stick under his boot.
Crack. Crack. Crack…
The noise that had started at the warrior’s foot raced outward like wildfire, echoing down into the basin.
Damn it.
Army ants detect and judge moving animals by vibration. Sure enough, the same eerie sound that had drawn us here came pouring out at once.
Ssshhhhh—!
What I had taken for bamboo and grass stirring in the wind was nothing of the sort. It was the sound of a living colony in motion—and the realization hit me all over again. The ants that had been going about their separate tasks turned as one, a single wave rolling toward us.
Then, scattered through that red tide, I saw the ones with the enormous mandibles—and a chill ran down my spine. Their jaws clashed together, adding a new percussion to the air.
Click! Click! Clack-clack!
The rushing hiss and the hard clicking swallowed the surroundings; every time the sound rolled over us, gooseflesh prickled across my skin. There was no longer any point in keeping quiet, so I shouted.
“Fall back!”
“Everyone, withdraw!”
I spun and yelled at the warriors behind me, who were still frozen under the weight of the colony’s majesty. At the same moment my urgent cry rang out, the ants at the bottom of the basin began their surge toward us.
A living wave the color of blood. That vast tide came flooding in like a rising sea.
Ssshhhhh—!
Without a word the advance party broke and ran the way we had come. Anyone swallowed by that dense red flood would meet an obvious end.
Thud. Thud-thud.
We tore through the jungle in a frenzy. Branches whipped our faces without mercy; cheeks and arms were scored raw. None of it mattered.
If they catch us, we’re finished!
Getting caught would be like stepping into a meat grinder. So we ran like mad.
Army ants are not especially fast—yet neither did they feel particularly slow.
“The river! Across the river!”
Mid-sprint I remembered that they had not crossed the water. We changed direction on the fly, and only after every one of us had plunged into the current did the death-chase finally end.
Clack. Click!
On the near bank they watched us, empty mandibles snapping, then—perhaps because sunset was almost upon them—turned back toward the basin.
Once we reached the opposite shore and escaped the crushing pressure of that swarm, every last one of us let out the long breath we had been holding.
“Whew…”
“Hah…”
“I-I feel like I just dipped a toe in the Three Paths River and yanked it back out…”
I collapsed onto the sun-warmed gravel of the riverbank. From inside my clothes Cho wriggled free and poked her head out. Soaked through, she crawled onto my face and began licking the water away.
Chirrrr.
“You all right, Cho? The Wukong-types don’t like water much. Daddy’ll dry you off right away, okay?”
I peeled off my upper robe, wrung it out, and was carefully drying her when Grandfather and Commander Gu Pae came over and sat down beside me.
“What monstrous creatures.”
“Young Master So-ryong, those truly were formidable demonic insects. That sound… it made a man’s knees go weak. A truly uncanny noise.”
Both of them wore the look of men who had had more than enough. Even Grandfather—Lord of Myriad Poisons, the Tang clan’s supreme master, a man who had never retreated from a one-on-one fight—looked thoroughly sick of the experience.
“This Lord of Myriad Poisons has never known fear, even in life-or-death duels against any opponent. Yet when those things came surging in, for the first time the thought of fear actually entered my mind. That mere tiny demonic insects could make me feel that…”
“Yes. They tend to try to devour anything that appears near them, so we have to be extremely careful.”
I finished drying Cho thoroughly and glanced around. Warriors lay sprawled along the riverbank in every direction, utterly spent. The sun had just dropped behind the ridgeline; the light was failing fast. I spoke to the men and to Grandfather.
“Well then—the sun’s down, so let’s check whether we can raise those things too.”
In other words, let’s see if they can be cultivated the same way.
“Check whether we can raise them?”
“You mean to examine them, Young Master?”
At the suggestion that we might keep them the way we had the Golden-Haired Bee Kings, everyone’s eyes went wide. Commander Gu Pae was clearly running a desperate little happiness circuit in his head, telling himself I couldn’t possibly mean what it sounded like.
“Y-you’re not suggesting we go back there, are you? W-we only just escaped their jaws. Surely not…”
I smiled and pointed across the river.
“The sun’s set, so we’ll just slip over, grab a few, and come right back.”
Some army ants carry venom. That made them poisonous insects—and if they were poisonous insects, then this spicy little Fabre had a duty to examine them in detail. We needed a few specimens.
Commander Gu Pae shot Grandfather a look that screamed, Please save me. I drove the nail home.
“Grandfather will of course be coming with us, right?”
“Haaah! Haaah! T-to think I’d be dragged into this insanity twice in one day! I-I thought when Young Master So-ryong said we’d go at night, they would all be asleep like the Golden-Haired Bee Kings!”
Commander Gu Pae was gasping for air—whether from fear or sheer horror was hard to say. His whole body shuddered as if he had wet himself. While we were catching army ants we had been spotted, and he had run all the way here with a major worker still clamped to his back. Once an army ant bites, it will not let go even if you cut its head off—and of course the one perched in the trees had locked onto Gu Pae’s collar.
“Ahaha… demonic insects don’t really sleep, you know…”
According to recent research, army ants rest at roughly twelve-hour intervals, yet the actual time spent “asleep” is only about eight minutes. Moreover they rest in rotating groups, so even if individual ants doze, the colony itself never stops moving. By human standards, ants are creatures that do not sleep.
“Still—look how well it went, didn’t it?”
I held up our prizes. Gu Pae shuddered again, thoroughly done with the day. The whole episode was clearly going to leave him with lasting trauma. I, on the other hand, was delighted: our midnight kidnapping had netted us four of the six castes in an army-ant colony.
Leaving out the queen and the males, we now had the four worker castes: major workers, submajors, media workers, and minor workers. All four.
Army-ant workers are born into four distinct castes. Majors with huge scythe-like mandibles that serve as soldiers. Submajors whose jaws cut and crush. Media workers that handle every ordinary chore of the colony. And the tiny minors that tend the queen. Four castes—and one night raid had delivered every one of them into our hands.
We laid the ants out by the campfire the remaining warriors had kindled and began examining them. Only then did Gu Pae recover enough to ask the important question.
“So… will you be able to raise them, Young Master?”
I shook my head. I had hoped, but there seemed to be no real prospect of rearing them. The fist-sized minor worker we had brought back alive showed no reaction whatsoever to my voice or to anything else.
Tick. Tick-tick.
It simply worked its mandibles in every direction. If I could make contact with a queen the way I had with the Golden-Haired Bee Kings, there might be a chance—but the idea of fighting through that red flood across the river, finding the queen, and somehow persuading her already felt dubious. Watching this little one’s blank response only deepened the doubt: even if I somehow convinced the queen, could I ever control the entire colony?
Ants possess a social structure and a kind of collective intelligence similar to honeybees, yet they differ sharply from bees, whose individual memory is excellent. An ant’s maximum memory lasts only about three days. These might be close enough to spirit beasts that their memories were better, but most army ants are effectively blind; they sense vibration yet communicate almost solely by pheromone. Without going through the queen, conversation is impossible. So even if we tried to keep them, true control looked unlikely.
“Then this was all for nothing?”
Gu Pae’s grumbling voice arrived the moment I said we probably couldn’t raise them.
“For nothing? We got our hands on such beautiful demonic insects, didn’t we? If we dry them properly and display them in the clan’s Hall of Myriad Poisons, they’ll look magnificent. Look at these mandibles—this is the one that latched onto Commander Gu Pae’s clothes earlier, right?”
I insisted it had not been a waste, yet in the firelight Gu Pae’s face still looked a little mournful.
The Poisonous Creature Squad that Gu Pae himself chose… grit your teeth and… ahem…
A joke from my past life floated up, but I kept it firmly inside my head. Then Grandfather’s question cut in.
“In any case, if raising them looks difficult, what do you intend to do now? Shall we move elsewhere to search for other poisonous creatures? West of here lies Ruili, or we could head farther south into the denser jungles of Xishuangbanna. Either is an option.”
We had our samples; he was asking whether we should relocate to hunt other poisonous creatures. I smiled and answered.
“No. We’ll follow these demonic insects—no, we’ll get ahead of them.”
“Get ahead of them?”
“You want us to outpace them?”
At the suggestion that we should race ahead of the swarm, everyone’s eyes went round. I explained why.
“Yes. If we move out in front of them, the insects and poisonous creatures that panic and flee in every direction will come pouring out. We can scoop them up with almost no effort. It’ll be a bit rough, of course.”
Army-ant columns are always trailed by flocks of birds and other insects for exactly that reason—everything that bolts in terror is easy prey. I was simply proposing we do the same.
“Doesn’t that sound fun?”
Why are you all making those faces? It really does sound fun…
For some reason, my question left every last one of them wearing a very strange expression.