Upping The Ante

29. The Path Forward

With the human queen locked between my jaws there is little the soldiers can do to prevent me from giving her a her a fatal haircut if I so choose.

The power is in my hands—claws!

Unfortunately for these soldiers, the rage in my heart is burning furiously after witnessing the damage they’ve done to my family.

I demand vengeance!

The soldiers are talking amongst themselves now, faces tight with worry as they try to work out how to deal with this situation. I don’t want to give them enough time to formulate a plan. If they decided to threaten the ant queen, then we might end up in a stand-off instead of this situation where I have the clear advantage.

I step aggressively forward, the human queen swaying in the grasp of my mandibles, her feet dragging on the ground as she tries to keep her feet under her. When the soldiers see me treating their royalty so poorly, they react angrily, clutching at their weapons and yelling at me in their language.

In response, I flex my mandibles around her neck. In an attempt to communicate my demands, I use one of my antennae to point several times at the ground.

Put your weapons down!

The soldiers look back and forth between themselves, confused by my gesture. I don’t think they expected to be able to engage in any sort of dialogue with a monster, and I don’t really blame them. I get the impression that intelligent monsters do exist, but the feeling I have is that those monsters wouldn’t want to play nice with any creatures on the surface. From what I’ve seen of monsters, I can only imagine they put that higher intelligence to the task of inventing ways to kill people more efficiently.

Clearly in this situation, they don’t know what to do.

Once again, I flex my mandibles forcefully and point several times to the ground with both antennae this time.

Put your weapons down!

There is real fear in the faces of these soldiers. Not for themselves but for the life of the person I hold between my mandibles. They know there is very little chance they can find a positive way out of this mess.

They talk back and forth for a few seconds before the soldier who had been battling Tiny shouts at the others and then lies down on the ground. Seeing his example, the others reluctantly comply, lying face down on the ground.

Ok, sure. That works too.

[Tiny, calmly walk over to them and take their weapons and shields away.]

With them lying down, we can reduce them as a threat by removing their equipment. This will help bring everything even further under my control. Perfect.

As I’m congratulating myself on my chess-like moves, I eventually notice that Tiny hasn’t obeyed my orders. Focusing my attention on him, he’s still just standing there, looking at me with a confused expression.

[What are those?] he asks.

Oh boy.

[Take away the pointy metal things, like what that guy stabbed you with, and their big metal boards which he used to block your punches!] I try to explain.

He stares at me with incredible intensity, the thoughts ticking over in his mind with excruciating slowness. Come on, man!

He stomps toward the soldier he’d fought with, probably the leader or captain of these men, looking at me all the while. Then he slowly bends down near the nervous soldier and grasps the sword between two of his thick fingers, glancing back to me like a child wondering if they’d done the right thing.

[Yes! That’s the sword! Good job, Tiny!]

His bat face splits in a wide grin and brings the sword to me, placing it carefully at my feet as if he were a dog playing fetch. Now that knows what he’s doing, he manages to go to each soldier and take their sword, bringing them back to me one by one before he tries to work out what the shield is. When he eventually figures it out, he collects them one by one, bringing them to me and completing his small pile of equipment in front of me.

It takes almost ten minutes for him to get it all done.

[Good job, Tiny,] I say exhaustedly.

He seems immensely pleased with himself. Just how low is your Cunning stat, seriously?

With all of the soldiers disarmed, I feel a lot safer. Against their incredible sword skills, just how many of my fellow workers have been destroyed? I refuse to let them off.

Moving slow, I start to take the queen toward the nest, allowing her to walk steadily as she matches my movement. The soldiers look on with worried eyes as I take their queen away from their line of sight. When one of them tries to turn his head to watch me move, I furiously point at him with an antennae until he turns back around.

As I draw closer, the true extent of the damage that has been done in this battle is exposed. As many as one hundred workers have been killed, their bodies sliced apart by the devastating sword light of their opponents.

These individual ants are simply too weak to fight against high-Level enemies like these. They aren’t intelligent enough to use tactics and they aren’t strong enough to push through the front. If there had been more numbers, say one thousand ants, perhaps they would have been able to swarm over the barrier and break it down. Then again, perhaps the mages would have been able to hold on long enough for these few humans to destroy thousands of my kind.

It isn’t good enough!

This shocking occurrence has clearly shown that against high-Level opponents the colony will only be able to achieve victory at the cost of many lives. For a normal monster ant colony that may be fine. Victory whilst throwing away the individual workers or treating them as disposable, and all that. If I have accepted that the workers of this colony are my family members, my siblings, then I refuse to let them die so simply.

This will be the last time.

[Tiny, I want you to bring that guy you were fighting over to the nest. Then I want you to come back out here and destroy the others.]

The big ape nods, smiling happily.