Excelkitus Beneath the Anthill (2)
Thanks to a bit of exploring, they found the door quickly, which meant they were able to make their way up to the second floor in no time.
The theme of the second floor was… the ant nest.
Giant Ants.
All three of them knew the Giant Ants' habits well enough, and this time even they hesitated.
"With Giant Ants, it's probably going to take a while."
"Ugh… they're so annoying. How do they even live like that?"
"They live just fine precisely because their habits are annoying to intruders."
Still, it was a relief that the matchup favored them this time.
With Jeanne in the party, they'd be able to move through this floor very quickly.
"What? How?"
"Simple."
The souls of dead monsters retain the habits those monsters had in life.
It was an obvious truth.
Even after the body dies, the soul remains as it was while it lived.
"So what would the Giant Ants' habits be?"
"They're ants, so… trying to go home? Or patrolling?"
"Soldier ants would look for enemies, and worker ants would head back to the nest. All the more so in a situation where they've come back from the dead and are confused."
"Oh! So you're planning to strap bombs onto the ones heading back!"
That was a good idea too.
But this time, he'd be doing something different.
"Uh… Siara, your hyung is making a really unsettling face right now."
"…Yeah, agreed. Absolutely diabolical."
"I… I think that one is also a good idea."
"Yoanna needs to learn how to say something negative for once."
What was with these people.
"The plan is simple. But once you hear it, you'll slap your knee and go, Ah."
Even he had to admit it was a clever plan.
See — work the brain, and the body gets an easier job.
{Hmm… you really shouldn't make that face from now on. You look like such a scheming villain.}
"Ahem…."
With a cough, Lee Jun smoothed out his expression and explained the plan.
Drrrrr—
The four of them were currently seated atop an enormous boulder.
The plain stretched out flat and endless in every direction, so the other boulders moving in the far distance were easy to pick out with the naked eye.
"That's our hyung, alright. A method I never even imagined."
"Yeah, this… I'll admit it. Pretty brilliant."
The two dolls hopped and skipped about the wide-open landscape like kids on a field trip.
Lee Jun and Jeanne watched them go and enjoyed the sunlight.
Though he had no idea what mechanism was projecting that sunlight down here.
"Honestly, I was surprised as well. So this is possible too, I see."
Jeanne, standing beside him, was admiring his strategy as well.
"Well, I've been thinking about how to put your ability to use for a while now."
"Does that mean… you have been thinking of me all along?"
Was that how it worked?
"Hmm, when you put it that way, I suppose you could say so."
"…I see. I'm glad."
Jeanne smiled.
He wondered how genuine this one was.
Something she actually felt? Or an expression she'd reasoned out with her head?
As he pondered that, he watched the corners of her mouth hover, half-rising and half not.
Just then, Timothy, who had been admiring the scenery, spoke up teasingly.
"Oh-ho, hyung's putting the moves on Yoanna."
"What?!"
At those words, Siara bounced up and down and yanked on Lee Jun's arm.
"Touch Yoanna and you're dead, you know that?"
"…If you actually hit me, I really would die, so don't even joke about it."
"Hmph! That's why you'd bett―"
Screeeech―
"Eeeek!"
Siara, mid-way into her lecture, went sprawling on her backside when the boulder came to a sudden halt.
"Ooow, what the heck…."
"We've arrived."
The spot where the boulder stopped.
The rock carrying the Giant Ant's soul had, in the end, obediently traveled exactly where Lee Jun intended.
"Is this one of the entrances?"
"Probably. Jeanne, how's it looking?"
"Almost all of them have stopped moving. The ones that haven't arrived yet would be… number 3 and number 16, I believe."
"Three and sixteen, got it. Then once those two show up, let's let it fly."
With that, Lee Jun pulled a remote control from inside his coat.
"When the time comes — boom. We blow it all."
He felt a strange thrill of excitement.
It wasn't often he got to detonate this many bombs in his everyday life, so something about it felt exhilarating.
Watching him, Siara asked,
"How'd you even know it would work out like this?"
"Huh? I already explained the principle."
"No, that's not what I mean. Knowing the method doesn't mean you can be certain it'll actually succeed, does it?"
"Oh, that?"
The plan Lee Jun had drawn up was simple.
Using the Giant Ants' habits, seal off every entrance to the ant nests below.
That was why he'd used boulders even larger than the entrances themselves.
"But… claiming there weren't enough of them and making us dig the rocks out ourselves…."
"You've got your own unique ability, so it wasn't exactly hard for you, was it?"
The shortfall in boulders had been made up by carving them out of the bedrock.
The second floor's ant tunnels spread beneath the entire terrain, so the ground here was extraordinarily solid.
That was thanks to the preparatory work the kids had put in.
Because of it, slicing the ground like peeling a fruit produced chunks as hard as actual rock.
On top of that, Lee Jun knew from his previous life exactly how many entrances the ant nests on this floor had.
Their precise locations, too.
Originally, sealing them all would have taken far too long, so he'd planned to take them one at a time — but with Jeanne here, that calculation changed completely.
"Okay, so you stuff a Giant Ant's soul into a boulder and use it to block the entrance. I get that far. But how did you know it would actually succeed?"
"What do you think the possible failure points are?"
"Hmm… two boulders could end up at the same entrance, I guess. Or they'd realize they can't get in and start wandering around all over the place."
Two points of doubt, then.
"Fortunately, I can explain both of those."
First.
Ants perceive the world through sight and pheromones simultaneously.
And as they'd learned from observing Siara and Timothy, any senses the subject could use in life seemed to remain usable even after being bound into undeath.
"So they'd be able to smell pheromones too?"
"I don't know that for certain either. It's not like I can hold a conversation with a Giant Ant."
But one thing was sure.
A boulder's body couldn't emit pheromones.
Which meant that when the ants saw their comrades possessing the rocks, they had no way of recognizing them as comrades.
To the ants, they were simply rocks.
In appearance, after all, that was exactly what they were.
"So they'd judge that a rock is already blocking the entrance and go looking for a different one."
"Oh, I see…!"
That way, one boulder could be assigned to each entrance.
Now, the second concern.
Whether, upon realizing they couldn't enter, they might abandon their positions.
"Siara, are you aware that you're inside a doll right now?"
"Huh? Me? Of course I am."
"What about you, Timothy?"
"Same here."
Just like that, both of them were fully conscious of the fact that they'd been bound into a doll's body.
So what about the Giant Ants?
Ants possess enough self-awareness to pass the mirror test.
He didn't expect them to fully comprehend their situation, but at minimum, they should be able to tell that their body's senses no longer matched what they'd known in life.
"Which brings us to the question — can these creatures resolve the dissonance that arises between the body they perceive and what their minds expect?"
He had done a great deal of research and deliberation on Jeanne's ability.
How could he understand everything about this power, and how could he turn it to practical use in the field?
"Siara, what does Jeanne's usual combat style look like?"
"Mm… she stuffs random souls into whatever's lying around and makes them flail about."
"And why does that work, do you think?"
"Because the souls… can't understand the situation they're suddenly in, so they go berserk. She uses that."
Exactly.
One moment you were dead — then you came to, and you were sealed inside some strange object.
The subject could still move, so naturally it began thrashing around, crashing into things in a frenzy.
This was data built up through long research.
Given even a modest degree of self-awareness, the subject would be unable to withstand the gap between body and mind, and it would lash out in madness.
"Well, that never happened to us."
"That's because we already knew about Yoanna's ability from the start."
The two of them had a point.
Even when they'd first entered their dolls, they hadn't gone into any wild panic.
Siara especially, since Timothy had already been through it before her.
"But that's you two."
Monsters, who by nature had neither that kind of experience nor human-level intelligence… would be entirely incapable of understanding what was happening to them.
"But then shouldn't they go berserk? This is the total opposite. They're all calm and docile."
"That's because they've gone into panic mode."
When people panic, they tend to fall back on whatever they normally do.
And that tendency appears in other living creatures as well.
So what about ants — creatures so well-ordered they form a single, disciplined society?
Unable to make sense of the situation… their instincts sent them home.
"Back to the queen — the one who can make sense of them again."
That was the heart of this operation.
"Wow…."
"Mm-hm~"
Siara stared at him in open amazement.
And Timothy smiled with delight.
Something along the lines of he's exactly as clever as I expected, probably?
When the answer satisfied them, it satisfied him too.
Then Jeanne, who had been listening to all of this, gave Lee Jun's sleeve a couple of tugs.
"Oppa, the last two have stopped moving as well."
"Good. Then shall we go?"
Lee Jun drew from his Pocket the crucial item this plan required.
It was…
"…The Pocket?"
"That's right. The prototype I used before."
The Pocket's strength was that it offered a storage space of virtually unlimited capacity.
After all, it had been built by processing a high-grade subspace inventory artifact.
And this prototype Pocket was filled to the brim with a certain substance.
"Don't tell me… that stuff from before?"
"Correct. That was a Reproduction Gate too, wasn't it?"
Innsmouth, was it?
A Reproduction Gate whose objective was to clear the quest on a planet that was 98% ocean.
Back then, he'd filled the Pocket to its absolute limit with seawater to speed up the clear — and to think it could be put to use like this.
"How many liters are even in there?"
"No idea. Probably enough to swallow the Pacific whole."
Since the Pocket at this stage didn't display its contents, there was no way to check.
Well, after today he wouldn't need to know anyway.
"Then let's get moving. Siara?"
"Ah — yep."
At Lee Jun's signal, Siara briefly lifted the boulder.
Whoosh―
Through the gap beneath it, Lee Jun tossed the Pocket in.
Set to release every last drop of its contents in one minute's time.
"All right, detonating now. Everyone fall back."
After sending the three of them away,
Lee Jun confirmed the bombs were securely attached, retreated just the same, and pressed the button.
KA-BOOM―
CRASH― boom― CRACK―
The nearest boulder burst apart before his eyes, and explosions rang out from every direction in rapid succession.
The bombs themselves had gone off all at once, but the distances involved meant the sound reached them at staggered intervals.
"Whew. Now that's a satisfying boom."
"Hahaha, hyung, your sense of scale never disappoints."
"Learned it all from you lot. You're the ones raising hell every single day."
Of course, at first he hadn't planned on the explosions at all.
He'd revised the plan after a spark of inspiration from something Siara said.
The original scheme called for nothing more than plugging the entrances with boulders.
But he'd realized that the Giant Ants might simply crush the rocks and claw their way back out.
So instead — use the bombs to collapse the entrances entirely.
"And I was the one who said to strap them to pebbles and send them inside, too…."
"This way's more satisfying, isn't it?"
Then, moments later, a tremendous tremor rolled up from beneath the earth.
GUUUUURUMBLE―
The seawater had begun pouring out of the Pocket.
"Hmm, I'm a little uneasy about it, but I don't think anything's leaking out."
It might be a problem if the entire ant nest filled up with water… but even this stretch of the floor was more than spacious enough to take it.
Several minutes passed like that.
Then, not far from where the four of them stood, a door leading to the next floor appeared.
Every Giant Ant down in the nests had been drowned out wholesale.
"Uh… I feel a little bad for them, actually…."
"Bad for monsters? Seriously?"
"I know, but still… this feels kind of, I don't know, off somehow."
Stay strong, Siara.
Well… he thought it was a somewhat anticlimactic method himself, but when it came to hunting, the efficient way was the good way, no?
Look — weren't they able to reach the next floor this quickly because of it?
But then.
From the hole they'd thought was sealed tight, he sensed something twitching and struggling.
Something churning and bubbling down there… no way.
"…Is it going to blow?"
"What?! That's not supposed to happen!"
"Hold on, first let's sprint for the door and―"
Fssssshhh―
"Huh?"
Contrary to their fears, there was no torrent of water erupting from the hole.
A mere trickle?
And along with that pitiful amount of water, the Pocket Lee Jun had tossed in came bobbing back up to the surface.
"…What the heck."
Apparently, the volume of water inside had been precisely the right amount.
Something about this… was an odd business.
"Did you calculate even that?"
"You're giving me way too much credit. Even I can't pull that off."
"Still, knowing Jun, it's totally possible he did."
Lee Jun denied Siara's claim as he retrieved the Pocket with an uneasy feeling.
Something about this place… this so-called ant nest.
It was definitely strange.