Turi gazed at his assessment in disappointment. The sheer quantity of essence cores that the flying ants had yielded had led him to believe he could bring every one of his Aspects of Ascension to prodigal at minimum, but in reality, the flying ants had been freshly born, and could hardly even be considered to truly be of the second realm because all of their Aspects were likely subpar. Of course, he had still made great gains. His strength was on the verge of ascended, his durability was towards the upper end of prodigal, and his senses were transcended. He had increased his intelligence quite a bit, though, and it wasn’t possible for Turi to measure his gains in that aspect.

His gaze lingered on his intelligence. It was undoubtedly his strongest Aspect, but, even after all this time, it was still abnormal. Turi assumed it wasn’t within the confines of the standard assessment system, unless Abnormal was the highest it could go, but that couldn’t be true. It had always been Abnormal, even when Earth first began its ascension.

In the end, it didn’t really matter. Ascending his intelligence Aspect had the same effect as it would have otherwise; it just made it harder to measure.

Turi was almost convinced to leave for the Sanctuary again, but he knew that it wasn’t a good idea. His assessment compared him to other crows, and crows weren’t very well renowned for their durability and strength. His ascended senses were, in reality, his only truly powerful Aspect in comparison to the other creatures on Earth. He would still lose out in terms of durability in strength to even an average human.

‘I’ve still got hunting to do,’ Turi thought, and sighed. The flying ants proved that the ants adapted quickly, and that was distinctly not good for Turi. He was very worried about falling prey to an ant with abilities he hadn’t expected, but Turi didn’t have time to hunt for weeks. Hunting the ants, who were all clustered together, was the fastest way he had access to.

Turi took off, and it didn’t take Turi long to arrive in the ant’s territory. He flew through the air for a long while, but no flying ants rose to meet him.

‘No free food, then? I suppose it wasn’t hard for even an ant to figure out that the flying ant variant species only gave away their limited supply of essence cores.’

Turi wished he could scowl, but that wasn’t an ability that a beak could enable. The best he could do was narrow his eyes and look annoyed in general.

Turi had spent so long flying around in the ant nest’s territory that a veritable army of ants pursued him from the ground. Turi flew as fast as he could to get away from them before, with significant trepidation in his heart, descending to the ground.

He had moved fast enough that the ant horde was a few minutes away, but Turi had no clue how he was going to deal with them. So, he didn’t. More ants were converging on him from every direction as quickly as they could, and that meant that every ant was moving at different speeds. The wizard ants were the slowest, and were, more often than not, stuck in low numbers because of it. The same applied to the leaping knight ants, but because they were the fastest.

Turi picked off the independent ants until he was forced to take to the air again and move. He repeated this a few more times before all of the ants suddenly… left. Not a single ant was outside the nest anymore.

‘How am I going to get any work done, now?’

The nest was an enormous mound that was at least five stories tall and took up almost as much space as a city block. Turi could only imagine how deep it must go; there was no way he was going anywhere near there.

He could still try to force them to come out, though. Turi flew far, far above the nest and formed a bowling-ball sized chunk of ice and dropped it on them.

It took a few seconds before it struck the nest, and Turi was only mildly surprised that it didn’t do much more than cave in a single tunnel. Still, not a single ant came out to repair the damage.

Turi wasn’t sure what to do. The ants had been willing to accept the minor losses in exchange for digging up second realm essence crystals and occasionally killing and harvesting an animal here and there, so what had changed?

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Their response to his attacks had also gradually grown larger, until an entire army had been trying to stop him. He knew that they were starved of essence cores, but was it really so bad that they needed to drop everything and hide from him?

***

Andromeda’s exoskeleton was cracked all over, and her royal guards were all corpses. Her ants swarmed towards her, but she wasn’t sure if it meant anything.

When a single worker ant had stumbled upon an enormous tunnel leading into her nest, it had been a dangerous discovery; one that should have been worthy of her attention, but Andromeda had handed the responsibility to a trio of lesser queens.

She doubted that it would have gone much better even if she had been the one to deal with the situation. The tunnel was miles long, and belonged to a nest of ants that she knew that she could never compete with. Each ant was at least twice the size of her own and, despite numbering only a hundred or so, they managed to make it to her hatchery. Even her royal guards were only slightly stronger than their average soldier ant, and Andromeda was only alive now because she had hatched her Sentinel early.

It was a mere infant, though, and it was unfinished. Even now, Andromeda’s heart ached at the sight of its corpse. If only she had had a single more day; her Sentinel would have hatched at its peak strength, and there may have been a possibility, however minor, that her nest would survive.

Andromeda pushed her grief aside and stood. Her injured legs struggled to hold her enormous body, but she started towards the exit. Even as she did so, she grasped hold of the hive mind and began giving out orders.

If Andromeda survived, she could make another nest elsewhere. And so, she would sacrifice this nest. She could not bring with her anything but the greatest of her assets. Her royal guards dead, the strongest ant she had access to were her knight ants, but she decided to bring the spitting ants along with her, too. It would not do to have no ranged support. Lastly, she needed worker ants; they were cheap to create and easy to manufacture, but a hive could not live without them.

The soldiers, wizards and her lesser queens would remain. Her queens resisted her will through the hive mind, but Andromeda was too mighty for them to fell her. They would die so that the nest could live.

Andromeda commanded the nearest knight and spitting ants to gather the important eggs and the corpse of her Sentinel. After all, its essence core, despite being merely an infant, would still be incredibly valuable, and she had several royal guards currently being nurtured. She would also, of course, need worker ants beyond the hundred or so that she brought along.

The only complication left was the crow. Her flying ants were not born yet, and although she commanded many of her ants to gather them as well, it would still be a problem until and even after they hatched. After all, they would need another day or so to go through a process of accelerated growth, and that was only if they received active attention from a queen. She would be the only one leaving, and it would be impossible for her to split her attention between more than ten or so at once while traveling.

She’d have to make it work.

***

Only a few minutes after every ant had withdrawn into the nest, they flooded out once more. Only spitting ants, knight ants and worker ants emerged, though, and they all carried eggs and food, as well as a very large ant’s corpse.

‘Is that the corpse of their queen?’ Turi wondered, but he soon found the answer to that question, when the queen truly emerged.

It was enormous; the size of a rhinoceros at least. It looked sort of like a centaur; its upper body was not that of an ant, but humanoid. It had six spear-like legs and six ‘arms’ that had no hands and were just as sharp as its legs. A pair of wicked-looking mandibles adorned its humanoid face, and two holes were in the place of its ears. Its carapace looked like it was made of metal, and reflected the sunlight so well that Turi would have had a hard time looking at it if his eyes weren’t so durable. As it was, he could look directly into the sun with zero downsides, although the glare did make it harder to see.

Otherwise, it was pretty ant-ish. Its many compound eyes grossed Turi out, and it was covered in injuries that oozed a weird purple blood.

Turi wondered why the ant took on a humanoid form. It was an ant; was it even smart enough to understand why it had done what it had done, or was it just a random choice? Turi shook his head; there were more important things to think about.

Ultimately, Turi wasn’t quite sure what to do. The moment that the queen emerged from the nest, the ants began moving.

‘They were attacked by something underground, obviously,’ Turi concluded, ‘After all, the queen’s injuries didn’t come from nowhere. Unless there was some sort of civil war?’

He leaned towards the idea that something had attacked them from within the nest. He had a hard time believing that there was any other ant in this particular nest that would dare trying to wage war against the queen that was before him now; it was so large and powerful despite not even being meant for combat.

It seemed impossible that such a tiny nest could harbor two queens of comparable might if this was its queen.