As the giant black ant is staring Damon down he carefully guts the sphere inside his pocket and slowly steps backwards. Unfortunately for Damon as soon as the ant saw the sphere disappear, it charged towards Damon in anger. Damon dodges out of the way and reaches behind his back to grab his makeshift spear.

The ant is quick to recover, and learning from its mistakes the ant didn't charge again. Instead, the ant slowly scuttles over to Damon with its mandibles open, intending to fight up close. Damon readies his spear and aims for the other eye.

The ant uses its mandibles to smack the spear out of Damon’s hands. Before Damon has a chance to react, the ant uses the sharp spikes on its mandibles to stab him in the stomach.

“AAARGH!”

The impact of the hit threw Damon against the wall of the warehouse. Damon now lying against the wall holding his stomach suddenly gets a burst of clarity. He pulls an object out of his left pocket, a pistol.

“Ugh, I should only use this as a last resort. But fuck, I can barely move right now.”

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Damon empties the clip aiming at both the eye and eye hole of the any. Some miss, but enough of them hit the target for the ant to fall to the floor bleeding purple-ish blood from its head.

“Fuck, I need to get outta here those gunshots will attract every damned bug in a 10-mile radius. And the pheromones on this ant will bring the whole colony on my ass as well”

Damon puts all his strength in his body, attempting to move but the pain is overwhelming. Unknown to Damon as his vision is cloudy from the pain, a purplish mist escapes from his pocket towards his stomach wound. Miraculously, the pain numbs enough for Damon to pick his body off the floor and limo over to the doors of the building. As he reached the door the pain was reducing by the second, enough for him to speed walk.

“I feel like I'm on drugs, my body is numb, my vision is blurry and my head is cloudy. Can I make it home in time?”

It is pitch black outside now, increasing the danger that Damon is now in. He reaches halfway home when a swarm of flesh flies start surrounding him, Damon now puts all his force into running. If all of those flies latch onto him at the same time, he will be bare bones within minutes.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Within 5 minutes Damon can see the house, but a few flies have also caught up to him and are now taking bites out of him. Every few seconds a fly tears a chunk out of him some even took a few fingers, blood leaking like a broken faucet. Damon finally reached the door, he tore off the flies latched onto his body, opened the door, and slammed it behind him. Damon only makes it a couple of steps before collapsing due to blood loss.

———————————————————

The next morning Damon wakes up with a killer headache.

“Fuuck, my head. Ugh.”

He sits up and puts his hands on his head. But that's when the thought hit him. How is he even alive?

Damon quickly looks down and sees a giant scar where the hole in his stomach was. Stunned, Damon took off all of his clothes to see his body littered with scars, dozens of times more than he had before. Even the cut on his face only showed a scar now.

“How could this be possible?! How much damage did I incur, and how could I have healed from it in one night?!”

Damon wracked his head to trace what could have changed for him to heal at this rate. But there was only one thing different about him yesterday, he had the sphere. Damon quickly dug through his pants to receive the object. Soon enough, he held the item in his hand inspecting it. Nothing has changed about the sphere, it looks as mystical as ever.

Damon digs through the kitchen and finds a knife, he then goes into the basement to find the med kit. He gathers both and sits down at the kitchen counter, he sets the sphere on the counter and uses the knife to cut open his hand. Blood leaks out of the cut immediately afterward. Damon looked back and forth between his hand and the sphere, waiting for something to happen. And happen something did, once again a purplish mist irradiates from the sphere and hovers over to the cut on Damon’s hand. It didn't happen immediately but the wound soon closed leaving a faint scar.

“This is crazy, it looks like this speeds up the recovery of my body, that must be why it still leaves scars. But if it only speeds up the recovery of my body, then how did my fingers grow back?”

Damon looks at his fingers, the ragged scar that encircles the base of a few of his fingers indicating that they were once vacant. Damon consoles himself, thinking that the magic marble would never make sense to himself anyway.

Figuring it would be best never to part with the sphere again, Damon fashions a necklace to the sphere and wraps it around his neck.

“With this, it shouldn't be able to escape from me that easily.”

Damon stands up and walks towards each of his windows and looks outside. He sees patrols of giant ants marching outside.

“Shit, if only I didn't meet that fucking ant-”

Just as Damon was observing the ants march, suddenly circles opened up in space behind every individual ant, like mini wormholes. And emerging from these ‘holes in space’ are terrifying bugs, praying mantises. The alien insects are over 8 feet tall and glow light blue, while their jagged scythes glow purple. Before any ant could notice them, they were all sliced into ribbons by the bugger predators in front of them. But for some reason the mantises didn't eat the ants, it was like they killed them for sport.

Damon is horrified, he hastily covers the window he was looking through and runs into the basement to hide. Hoping they don't come near.