The city was covered in a thick layer of white. It was winter, and the temperatures were far worse than they had been before Earth ascended to the second realm. Turi could just barely feel the chill, but that didn’t stop his breath from being foggy.

A snowstorm was blowing through, but Turi was unwilling to delay his hunt for anything. The lower visibility would help him, if anything, although the strong winds would make it difficult for him to escape.

Turi was out of the Sanctuary, and he would not return until he was stronger. As he gazed at the ant nest before him, Turi briefly doubted himself, but he quickly pushed the doubt away.

This ant nest was at the very edge of the city proper, and it didn’t have very much competition from its surroundings. That meant that it wasn’t nearly as strong as the ant nests at the park.

There was an interesting thing about this ant nest, though, and that was that they weren’t very homogeneous. There were a myriad of ant types, and each of them had taken different paths. It resulted in some of the ants being able to use magic, and it resulted in others being more akin to the knight ants from the park.

‘It provides plenty of variety.’ Turi thought, and he prepared himself to begin his eradication of the ant nest. It would likely take ages, and Turi wanted to have a decent place to stay.

As Turi quickly built himself a small stone hut to stay in, Turi manifested his tome. It opened to the first page, and he read his very disappointing assessment.

His strength was average. His durability was subpar. His senses were above average, but only barely. Turi’s intelligence was, as always, abnormal, and it was the only objectively positive thing in his assessment.

While his Aspects of Ascension were bad, Turi knew that he would be able to best creatures that were stronger than him. Turi was very clever, and he had gotten very skilled with magic over the past months.

Turi finished his hut, and he was ready to hunt.

The nest was a few blocks away from his hut, and it didn’t take long for Turi to encounter his very first ant. As they weren’t at war with anything, they were more spread out than the ants in the park, and that was perfect for Turi.

It was the size of a Chihuahua, and its exoskeleton was the color of charcoal. Its mandibles were sharp and long, and the ends of its legs were like spearheads. Turi had already done a bit of watching to find out about them, and knew that these ones used magic. Luckily for Turi, the magic that it used was very broad, and wasn’t nearly as strong as the creatures that specialized their variant species, like the stone-clad squirrels or Deri’s ‘big water bird’.

Turi almost felt bad for the wizard ant as he killed it. It couldn’t put up any fight whatsoever, because Turi’s control over the world through essence was stronger than the ants. It was left with only its tiny, weaker body to protect itself, and that wasn’t enough.

As Turi dug out its essence core, he was suddenly ambushed by another ant, this one a knight ant, or this nest’s version of it. It was a bit smaller than the ones at the park, but its carapace was just as durable and its mandibles just as sharp.

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He flapped his wings and shot backwards, but the ant caught up to him in a single, enormous bound using all six of its legs. That was certainly not something that the knight ants of the park had been able to do. Turi weaved past its mandibles and tried to go higher, but it leapt above him and forced him lower to the ground using its spear-like legs. Turi’s eyes flared, and the ant was engulfed in flames for a brief moment. Turi took the opportunity to get twenty feet away, but he deliberately stayed low to the ground.

As Turi had expected, the ant leaped at him, and a trio of stone spikes rose from the ground, right where it would land. There was no way for it to change directions mid-air, and the stone spikes pierced straight through its body due to the force and momentum behind the ant’s leap.

Turi was annoyed that he had been forced to expend so much essence during the fight, and even as he retrieved the ant’s essence core, he tried to think of a better way to have killed the ant.

‘Now that I know that its legs are built for leaping, I can take advantage of when it uses them the first time to close the distance. The jumping knight ants shouldn’t be a problem in low numbers, nor should the wizard ants.’

Once Turi retrieved and consumed the core, he took off towards the wizard ant’s corpse. He hadn’t been able to take its core, after all. When Turi arrived, though, the core was gone. Another ant had stolen it.

Turi sighed and went deeper into the ant nest’s territory. It didn’t take long before he encountered another ant, and this one was a worker ant. It had four human-like arms sprouting from its back, but was otherwise specialized in endurance so that it could work throughout the day.

The most interesting thing about the worker ant was that, in the human-like arms on its back, it carried the essence core that Turi had hunted.

Turi dove down on it, and it had no time to react due to the thick snowstorm having concealed him. Turi’s beak cracked its carapace and burrowed deep within its neck, but it wasn’t fatal. It wasn’t fatal, until Turi withdrew his beak and finished his attack by turning the water in the air into ice and piercing the rest of its throat.

With how cold it was, Turi found it strangely easy to use the ice to kill the ant.

Turi quickly ate the stolen essence core and retrieved the worker ant’s essence core before continuing his hunt.

The next ant he stumbled across was another wizard ant, and Turi dealt with it without any problems. As Turi stood atop the ant’s corpse, taking a brief moment to rest before digging its core out, the storm briefly cleared and Turi could see at least a dozen ants heading in his direction.

Rather than flee, though, Turi took off in their direction. His senses were better than the ants, and he found them through the snowstorm before they saw him. There were eight soldier ants, each of them weaker than the ones at the park, and three wizard ants. Turi knew he couldn’t stop two wizard ants from using magic, let alone three, and so he left the group alone as they went after the corpse of the ant he had just killed.

Turi went in a different direction, and he found another ant soon enough. This one was a soldier ant, and Turi did the same thing to it as he had done to the worker ant. The snowstorm was the only real reason he was able to kill the ants with such ease, and Turi was more than willing to take advantage of it.

***

Andromeda peered through the eyes of one of her spy ants at the creature that was moving deeper into the nest’s territory. It was a small bird, and Andromeda sighed. She desperately wanted some form of competition, not because she relished in her ants dying, but because it was causing them to die. They had no opportunities to grow stronger, and so even this tiny, pathetic bird could make its way into her territory.

She grabbed hold of her ants through the hive mind, and directed them to gather in larger groups. Right now, when they were all traveling independently, they couldn’t defend themselves adequately due to the snowstorm.