Turi gazed at the tome’s assessment of his strength, and for once, he wasn’t that disappointed. His strength was firmly prodigal, his durability was just barely prodigal, and his senses were ascended. Turi wanted his strength to be ascended next, and he wanted his durability to be firmly within prodigal territory, but he wasn’t sure if that was possible. The hive was becoming increasingly scary, and Turi was beginning to debate leaving for a different hunting ground, but he decided to keep going for a while longer.

Turi located a group of ants not soon after he entered the nest’s territory, and this time, he decided to fight them head on.

The group was composed of four soldiers, two leaping knights, one spitting ant and two wizards; nine in total.

He wouldn’t be catching them by surprise with the lack of a snowstorm, and they were already aware of him, apparently.

Turi reinforced his body with essence and dove. The wind whistled past him, and Turi was so high up that it took ten or so seconds before he connected with his target; the weaker of the two leaping knight ants.

The speed of his thoughts suddenly spiked, and the world seemed to come to a stop for a brief moment; just long enough for Turi to locate the problem and respond.

The spitting ant had spat its acid at him, but there was no hope that it would strike him. The two wizard ants weren’t strong enough to channel essence into the environment and manipulate it to attack him. The leaping knight ants and soldier ants couldn’t attack him right now.

So, where was the threat? Turi had no clue, and so he reacted as best he could. His eyes lit up, and even as he pulled up and tried to minimize his size, the wind’s currents changed and propelled Turi several feet to the right.

His thoughts slowed, telling him that he was out of danger, and Turi found the threat. It was a flying ant that Turi had somehow failed to notice, and it only took Turi a few moments to figure out how he had missed it.

The snow covering its body gave it away; it had been hiding beneath the snow.

The ant itself was the size of a large pre-ascension dog, and it had several weak points. Its exoskeleton had to move out of the way for the elytra to sprout from its body, and that exposed its soft inner body.

The moment that Turi figured this out, he gathered the water in the air and froze it within half a second and drove it into the flying ant’s body. It cut through with startling ease, and the flying ant died.

As it fell, Turi looked around, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about the swarm of flying ants that rose from the snow and started flying towards him. There were at least twenty of the things, and a few of them had the strange bulge in their head that the spitting ants did; Turi assumed it was the acid gland, but he wasn’t sure.

On one hand, he wasn’t safe in the air anymore, but on the other, these things were awfully exposed. When Turi noticed how poorly they flew in comparison to him, though, he decided that this was definitely a good opportunity. Turi dove straight into the swarm, and, up here where he was in his home territory, the many flying ants could hardly touch him. Turi weaved past mandibles, narrowly dodged their spear-like legs and diverted the globs of acid, and all the while, Turi killed them with spikes of ice. It wasn’t nearly as easy as Turi made it look, though.

Turi had manually tripled the speed that he thought at, and he still felt like he was constantly on the edge of death. He was expending essence rapidly, and dodging the attacks of twenty ants at once while trying to kill them in a single attack using ice was hard. He lost track of the number of times that his thoughts spiked in speed, warning Turi of an incoming attack that would cause grievous damage if he didn’t do anything about it.

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All the while, Turi had to tear out the cores of the ants that he had killed before they fell to the ground and were stolen by the ants. His brain felt like it was on fire, but regardless of the narrow line that he flew upon, Turi felt indomitable.

***

As Irinian, the queen that had sculpted the flying ant variant species, watched the fight, she trembled. She could already feel Andromeda pressing down on her through the hive mind, and she could feel her majesty’s anger at her incompetence.

Irinian knew that she was expendable, and that her only purpose prior to now had been to birth new brood. She doubted that she would ever get the opportunity to help the hive in a greater way again; Andromeda wasn’t one to forgive.

***

Andromeda seethed. She stomped her many spear-like legs, and they bit into the hardened dirt with ease. She would have to delay her Sentinel and create an ant that could properly deal with the crow. She could hardly believe the incompetence of the queen that she had given birth to. How could Irinian create such a horrid ant, riddled with flaws?

“Tear off your leg.” Andromeda commanded Irinian. It would regrow, and she needed to be punished.

Her rage faded when Irinian obeyed without hesitation and ripped a leg off, but her anger returned when she was forced to leave the Sentinel to go and do Irinian’s job for her.

Seething, Andromeda went to the second-largest egg in the hatchery and began sculpting its variant species. She did not give it an exoskeleton, and instead gave it an endoskeleton. Its flesh was to be as durable as the carapace of a worker ant, and it was to be faster and more agile in the air than it was now. It would fight in swarms, and would act as almost a single entity.

An hour passed, and Andromeda was finishing the egg when she was struck by a bout of divine inspiration. Her enormous body trembled in excitement as she implemented the changes. They would need a bit of sentience for it, but she still wanted them to fight as though they were a single entity, and so she made their connection to the hive mind stronger.

Andromeda finished with the egg an hour later, and she debated making a second flying ant variant species, but no. She didn’t want to spend a single second longer away from her Sentinel. Before she did that, though, Andromeda grasped her hive mind and gathered every living flying ant that Irinian had made, and commanded them to return. Next, she commanded her ants to kill the flying ants and harvest their cores when they arrived, and, finally, she turned away from the second egg to return to her Sentinel. It would take a day for the variant species’ progenitor to hatch, and then her many other subservient queens could mass-produce it. The crow would not be a problem for much longer.

***

An hour had passed since Turi had returned from his hunt, and Turi felt like he was about to die. He had carried tens of essence cores back with him using his magic, and had expended an entire two essence crystals in the process. When he finally arrived, he sealed himself within his stone hut with his prizes and started eating, but it was taking forever. He had to stop whenever his stomach started to get hot, and that meant that it was taking ages.

Turi had briefly debated crushing them for the immediate essence, but had thought better of it. Because of this admittedly correct decision, for the next ten or so hours, Turi would be sitting around with nothing much to do. He practiced chess and wrote in his tome whenever he thought of something, and he thought back on his fights and thought of what he could have done better, but it was boring, and it was hard to concentrate with the powerful burning sensation in his stomach.

‘I wonder how I can even fit so many essence cores into my stomach,’ Turi wondered. The essence cores had a maximum size as far as he could tell, and that was a very good thing because Turi was only barely able to fit them in his beak as it was now. However, he must have… ten or so in his stomach, right now? ‘There’s no way my stomach is that large,’ Turi thought as he looked at himself in the reflection of a metal plate. He hadn’t grown an inch in ages.