It was surprising for the Son of the Queen to find himself still alive. At least getting off of Rotaire had been easy enough once the planet had been taken over, as they merely had to find their nearest allies. Humans were very useful for moving far.

The war was over… officially. However, that didn’t mean people like himself could rest. He wasn’t going to be spying on their new planetary neighbors, not yet at least. But just because there were no major planets under control of these particular factions didn’t mean they were completely gone.

Obviously humans were best equipped to find enemy bases and the like, and they could deal with those easily enough as they scoured the surrounding systems. But they had allies or at least potential allies still in a difficult situation. The faction that been the first ready to resist the insanity of the Void Scrying Sect and Twin Soul Sect mostly controlled smaller, less populated planets. And it was those planets that most likely still had Twin Soul Sect members hiding among them.

The Shimmering Spears had heard of spies among them, and perhaps they had managed to remove all of the problematic intruders… but void ants could help quite a bit. All they had to do was take a little nibble of everyone’s energy, and they would know for certain who was tainted with the cultivation of a foul sect.

Unlike his previous mission, this was a joint effort between humans and void ants, so extraction would be much simpler. The only issue was that most of the local humans weren’t supposed to know they were there. That was because the Twin Soul Sect might choose to hide away if they thought void ants might be coming for them. Also the part where people were afraid of the void ants.

Which was silly, because the only threat void ants posed was potentially killing people, and humans did that to each other all the time. But humans were silly like that, so he didn’t worry himself about it too much.

-----

It was weird to think how fast human ships were. Obviously they were blindingly fast when traveling around a planet, but between planets or especially between systems? The Son of the Queen couldn’t comprehend it. A ship might go between planets in the time it took him to walk from the bridge to its storage at the back- though there weren’t many particularly large ships that were also fast.

The point was that it didn’t take long, but it was long enough that void ants got restless just standing around. Humans too, but humans were better at relaxation.

Ultimately, the void ants filled the time by mixing among each other, not even really socializing but just meeting each other to recognize later. The Son of the Queen passed a particular other without much thought. He wasn’t dismissive of this other ant, but she would not be giving him orders nor would he be receiving any from her. Thus, with her place in the power structure irrelevant, so was she as a whole. The same with most void ants, and they would think the same of him.

But something stopped him. She was small, as warriors went. Yet she exuded authority and confidence. The Son of the Queen himself had not been a particularly large void ant before, and now he still wasn’t as big as the royal guard. “Who was that?” he asked one of the others. They didn’t know, so he asked more until he found one with an answer.

“Sergeant,” she replied.

Oh. So not that important then. Wait. “You mean the Sergeant?” he replied.

“Yes,” the other ant agreed. “Many commendations from Eckit.”

She really was small. The Sergeant was older than him, and he still outsized her somehow. Though the Son of the Queen heard about her taking down a commander a while back, and she would likely be stronger now, even if she was not particularly bigger.

The Sergeant was another anomaly, like him. A unique individual, and one of those that inspired in him thoughts that it was even possible. Perhaps he might have still developed down his strange path of survival even without that, but he couldn’t be certain.

She was a hero. He wanted to meet her, but she was already gone… and besides, she might not be interested. Most likely they would be split up upon landing, but he could hope for another chance. Following her simply didn’t seem right… but he would keep his eyes and sense of smell active.

-----

With the issues in the lower realms settled for the moment, the Scarlet Alliance breathed a collective sigh of relief. Perhaps their connection would be revealed someday, and they were doing their best to prepare for an assault by either of the great powers surrounding them, but they weren’t ready yet.

Other than secondary risk from the war with the Trigold Cluster, they had one more point of connection to deal with- tuning their ascension receiving platforms to include members of the Shining Cooperative. There were very few who had made such a choice, most who were capable opting for Assimilation, but some were glad to take a chance to visit the upper realms. Most likely, they were there as something akin to scouts. The Shining Cooperative would want to determine whether they were legitimate, since their previous understanding of the upper realms had only been through the lens of invaders.

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And while they weren’t entirely incorrect to apply that knowledge to the whole of the upper realms, it wasn’t right either. The Scarlet Alliance spoke to that fact, both its current members and the ability for it to even be formed in the first place. Ceretos, Rutera, and Weos did form part of their core, but members of the Dark Ring and the One Thousand Palm Sect were native to the upper realms. The latter was a more recent addition, but the Scarlet Alliance was made to grow.

Some of their members had pipe dreams of them becoming a massive monolith like the Trigold Cluster or Exalted Quadrant, but even if they someday reached their size they would be quite different. They were based on a harmony with the lower realms rather than conflict or exploitation. It was working quite well for the moment, but eventually their growth would taper off. Perhaps exploiting the lower realms might be tempting then, but if they ever broke that trust their long term prospects would be ruined. Not that their core members would let anything like that happen to begin with.

Though most people didn’t want to admit it, Catarina controlled the vast majority of their formations on the core world of Xankeshan, and was at least in part responsible for the construction of many more on their other worlds. Their boundaries were slowly expanding, brought about in some part by natural growth and in addition by various worlds requesting to join. And everyone was allowed to join, as long as they agreed to follow certain universal laws that prevented things like slavery and restricted intersect conflicts. There were also necessary contributions of materials, though most of those directly went to build formations and otherwise benefit their own planets.

Obviously the exact rules for a group spanning many systems were complex, though they did their best to make them straightforward. They had no interest in growing into some sort of byzantine mass of restrictions nobody could figure out. They just wanted a functioning society, and they had many experts at work doing their best to create a system that worked as smoothly as possible.

All the while, they continued to prepare for war, doing their best to strengthen their systems from the ground up so that they would be ready when the time came.

-----

Chidi had grown quite used to having a handful of void ants riding around on him at all times. However, he could only stay with them for so long before he had to attend to other matters. Now that he had developed methods to pick them out better, he didn’t find them so disconcerting. Most people could just see them, but he had to use his energy senses to search for nothing.

As for understanding the ants as an intelligent species, he didn’t have trouble with that. After all, some of his earliest acquaintances and his current best friend were wolves. The potential for them to bite through his energy defenses didn’t bother him as much as it might others, since he’d probably gotten too used to placing his hands in between sharp teeth. Though in his defense, the first time he hadn’t known that what he was feeling was Spike’s mouth. That was why he was feeling it, after all.

Chidi couldn’t sense the movements of void ants very well… except in very particular circumstances. Those circumstances being when they used sword related insights to attack with their mandibles.

If Crossed Antennae had been hoping for a battalion of trained warriors, she was hiding her disappointment well. As it turned out, most void ants weren’t weird enough to want to try sword techniques, nor crazy enough to want to learn how to use poisons. As a group, they had taken in quite a bit of Aconite’s knowledge about poisons, but mostly for the sake of colony avoidance. Only a few very ambitious ones were learning to carry small packs of extremely condensed toxins.

Still, Chidi and Aconite had a handful of disciples each. Just because it was out of the rapidly growing population of void ants on their few planets didn’t mean that the disciples weren’t still valuable as individuals.

The only weird part was that they didn’t have or want names. So any names Chidi had for them were personal nicknames to differentiate them with Aconite. Snips and Chops were probably the best of the bunch. The others had certainly grown stronger in their own way, but Snips had cut a branch as thick as Chidi’s finger in half. Pretty impressive since her mandibles couldn’t even fit around something that size. Also dangerous for anyone who got in her way. Chops was no less amazing in her own way, having carved a line in a stone with a single attack as long as Chidi’s palm.

Given their relative sizes, Chidi thought it wouldn’t be long before they were doing the equivalent of cutting mountains in half. Assuming their growth continued, which might be difficult as they couldn’t use energy. Only insights about cutting and the sharpness of their own tiny mandibles. Then again, they might also simply grow larger and maintain proportionately scaled attacks. If that was the case, if they could manage to get to even half of the size of the Great Queen then Chidi feared for their enemies' necks.

Was it ultimately valuable for the colony? That he was uncertain of. A few hundred traditional void ants would probably be a better combat force in the long run. Several standout individuals would hardly sway things either way, given the population explosions the void ants were experiencing.

But Chidi learned something. And Aconite as well. Not about negating energy, unfortunately, but trying to teach those quite different from themselves let them learn more about their own abilities. Chikere would doubtless be proud of him for making sharp ants. She had an indirect disciple in the lower realms that used a sword, and she was quite proud of that.

As for Aconites disciples, the best two she had named after two sorts of mundane ants that used venom. One was Bullet, the other Fire. Chidi didn’t quite understand how their particular specialties differed. All he knew was that together they carried tiny packets of extreme danger on each other’s backs, and they could bite deep enough to reach a person’s bloodstream directly.

Like all void ants, the actual danger of the tiny disciples was not that they could kill someone, but that they could kill anyone. With the potential exception of Augmentation and Domination cultivators, they would likely be equally deadly- and there was no saying that they couldn’t take out the most powerful cultivators. It was just that the stronger a cultivator was, the more likely they had some sort of countermeasure… or simply being fast enough was a solution. Cultivators didn’t need to augment their damage against void ants, merely the speed. So even if a void ant might negate the extra impact force of an attack, they could still just be squashed normally as a palm nearly instantly reached them.

Still, Chidi could imagine them taking out some Integration cultivation cultivators by surprise, which would be a huge boon. Preferably ones who were planning to go to the lower realms and invade. That was what the colonies were all for, after all.