While Hughestace could pull water from nothing, or maybe the air because of that whole conservation of mass thing but Mila had not thought to experiment on that when it had mentally come up, the water still tended to be close to the ambient temperature.
This meant that, at the intersection of the current temperature of ‘too damn toasty’ and the relative humidity of ‘inhaling lake water’, their forced baths were pleasant for all of half a second. After that point, it was just all the more moisture to make everyone more miserable, with their forestward journey not promising any improvement.
The scales helped, Mila considered, but even still her wet clothes and thin leathers clunk to her and made each movement pull everything else in a way that was just off. Naw-Naw had the worst of it too, drenched as they had been, and shaking the water out of their fur had not done nearly enough.
That discomfort of wet clothes, fur, skin, and scales was affecting how everyone moved too, save Rora - wearing the eyes flipped a switch that had her focused in, hungry to find what she was seeking. For everyone else, the quiet irritation and heading off the road led them to being less quiet, unintentionally.
Mila was still a whisper, gliding past foliage and brambles and whatnot. Hughestace kept getting the tips of his javelins snagged on the thin branches reaching down from tree trunks, and Aluca and Naw-Naw were… trying their best, but still stepping on half-rotten twigs and kicking through the forest floor detritus. Hell, even undistracted, Rora was far and away the loudest, heavy footfalls being put down heavily and steel-clad tail trailing behind her.
All that to say, all of their sneaking eggs were in an unquiet basket, and Mila had no idea if that was the correct choice. She knew ants did a lot of smell stuff, but she had no clue whether they sought out prey audibly. And that was for regular-ass ants. Magically enlarged mutant-ass ants were probably a different ball game and were likely to mix it up eventually. All Mila could hope was that the mix-up would come in a way they could work around.
Going all-in on the olfactory element being the avenue that was most dangerous meant all the stops were being removed, though. As they maneuvered around a walnut tree of some stripe, maybe fifteen feet across and scarred by its long-ongoing battle with ugly, twisted creepers, Naw-Naw withdrew a doubly bagged pouch and removed a dried pepper that still managed to be nuclear red. Mila liked spiciness more than she ought to, but her eyes watered at the trailing smell when it hit her nose.
Naw-Naw steeled their soul even as their eyes watered and then gave a few silent words, the only sign of the prayer being the moving lips and how the weight of the pepper changed, just in Mila’s vision. It grew more significant and everyone could tell, even if Aluca and Rora did not turn to see it.
The magic worked, the Goddess having left her mark, Naw-Naw moved, snapping the pepper up and gulping it down as fast as they could, leaving only the smallest tidbit of a stem and a faint keening as the gnoll suppressed a cry of pain. Immediately, their eyes grew red, their nose started running, and even their mouth started to over-salivate, and Naw-Naw had to pause for a few long seconds, fighting their body to not vomit up the clearly toxic substance just imbibed.
As Naw-Naw recovered, through, hoisting themself straight and flashing a thumbs up, Mila noted that as the smell of the pepper vanished, the lemony scent did not rush in to replace it. A tentative sniff of the air came up… not completely empty, but damn close.
“‘At’ll, hah, ‘elp keep our scen’ gone,” Naw-Naw explained quietly between panting, trying to get all the… everything, under control. The tidbit of stem was flicked far away as if it had personally offended the chef, and it took a few more seconds before they could continue onward. Rora specifically seemed restless, the silvery eyes demanding action and each wasted second being that much longer until the hunter found her prey.
That the prey was hopefully a big old pile of very dead, very stationary ants did not matter to the magic, or maybe the thing that had granted the magic. And when they once more started on their way, that was enough.
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Knowing what to look or listen for was a game changer, in most measurable ways. Everything else with the means had fled, and anything unable to do so speedily was no longer a factor. That left, to Mila’s calculations, their group and approximately infinite giant ants, rounding it out to an even number. Plus the tiny things, the regular mosquitos and gnats.
Which meant that every uneven rustle of brush out in the forest was one of the infinite, seeking out the next thing to kill and bring back to the hive. The hive that they still had yet to see, although Mila had no clue on whether that meant the hive was just blocked by trees, or if it did not have an above ground part yet.
Each sound of ants somewhere brought the group to a halt, immediately ready for whatever more chaotic fight would happen this far into the more-choked woods, but each time, nothing came except for uncomfortable quiet.
Just waiting.
After some time, Hughestace would signal with a hand to press forward and they would do exactly that, trying to be quiet and mostly failing. Another thing that would be near-impossible to test, Mila supposed. But at the same time, she pushed the distracting thought out and away. There was not room here to fuck up, and they could all feel it.
The crack of wood splintering, the grinding of plant fiber being crushed, was a break of expectations. Given the circumstance, not a pleasant one either, especially as the sound continued, drawing out longer and longer. There was a momentary break in it before it repeated, and the pattern continued, over and over, the stretches of racket more or less fifteen seconds long. Before the decision had to be made on whether to push towards the noise, as Rora’s eyes and a pointed sword tip dictated, the sound abated and did not pick up again.
There was a minute of quiet, wind just barely moving the canopy above, before Hughestace gave a nod and a quiet “Forward.”
It was another minute of carefully picking their way forward before Rora pushed past a thorny bush and tilted her head to the side. She moved out of the way but pulled up, letting everyone come through until Mila was the last to pick her way through, managing to keep from getting snagged as she went.
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The grinding noise had been a tree, certainly - a big one that was larger than the walnut tree, even if it did not have any handy identifiers that Mila recognized. Some kind of deciduous thing. It was still standing.
However, it would not be living for all that much longer. Something, and Mila had the solid guess to what, had been working to strip the tree’s bark down to the wood, starting about six inches off the ground and going up some seven feet. It was not yet complete around the tree, but the ant was gone and only shards of the dry, outer bark were there at the base of the tree, so the ant would be back to finish the job.
“Guess we know how they’re keeping momentum going. Giant ants gotta eat big,” Mila said, still eyeing the stripped swath of the tree. In the back of her head, she was trying to do the math for approximately how much plant matter had been removed from the tree, eyeballing the tree’s diameter at around twenty feet, plugging that in with her two and her three point one four, a couple inches of depth shaved off the circumference, not that the end result of some 160 cubic feet of plant matter meant anything. How much did a worker ant consume in a day, how much could the colony harvest in that same time, how much faster were the ants outpacing tree growth within the forest?
With how long this might have been going on for, Mila could see how it would be akin to the terraforming that the council had assumed was a dragon. How long would it take the big trees to have their leaves turn brown and die, a couple weeks perhaps?
Somewhere between six months to a year for a colony to produce new princesses to go found their own colony and the timetable felt unpleasantly tight. The trees seemed like they would be slower, less efficient food than whatever the ants could hunt, when there was prey around.
It also cemented to Mila that these were invasive, that they were not just some local animal that was just out of sight all before. It was borderline antpocalypse if they were allowed to continue, and there was something to be said for better knowing that moving to intervene, instead of retreating to let the fuckos back home know, was the correct move. That something was largely ‘holy fuck, not allowed to mess this up.’
Mila actually took the time, the first time since Naw-Naw downed that weaponized pepper some half hour back, to look over her friends. Actually see how they were doing.
That Naw-Naw was clearly still struggling with the aftereffects of the pepper made her grimace, even as they chewed over half a biscuit to try to help the internal fight. The boys both seemed to have been working their own thoughts, staring at the mostly stripped base of the tree, and their looks were growing stormy. Mila did wonder what conclusions they were getting to, exactly, but the group was still being quiet - as silent as they had been since they left the road, actually, as nobody was pushing through a forest that did not want them here.
Rora, though.
The pools of silver had simply slid over the scarred giant, apparently. Rora stood tall, relatively oversized sword resting before her with one hand on its grip, the other most of the way down its length, worked metal and gifted moonlight protecting her fingers from the edge.
“We’re close,” she said, locked on to the next bundle of brush they’d have to move through. The statement was enough to jolt everyone out of their little break, wake them up to how any break was potentially too much.
They needed safety, and their way finder for that had spoken. It was all that was needed.
Aluca slipped in behind Rora, and Hughestace and Naw-Naw followed as best they could, side by side. It gave Mila just a moment longer under the shadow of the tree that would soon be dead. That last little lingering bit was enough to wonder if the tree was older than her. If it was older than her two combined lifetimes. If it was older than Rat-Hate.
She had no idea, and she tried to push those questions, entirely irrelevant as they were, out of her mind. Yet as she carefully head a grabbing branch away from her shoulder with the side of one of her blades, it kept swirling back around.
It was only a minute or so later when they got to another stripped tree, this one bare around the entire base and its leaves somewhere between autumn-crisp yellow and rotting sludge-brown, still on the canopy above. It was downright gross, but they walked under it anyway, passing on by and Mila praying that none of the leaves, which undoubtedly felt like disappointed slugs, would fall on her.
Such undirected praying could have probably been sent to the deity of insect repellants, but Hughestace caught the bug’s presence before the inverse happened.
The foliage moving some fifteen feet through a narrow alley of saplings had hardly even started before the elf pulled a javelin out, pulled back, and launched it. This time, whether through luck or skill, the beastie was struck and the weapon held firm, sticking forth from greenery and ensnaring the ant, still unseen, with its unwieldy presence.
Not willing to give it opportunity to call its kin through scent or smell, Mila was already moving, boots kicking her from foothold to foothold and crossing the space in a blink. Not willing to meet what was a flurry of whatevers trying to dislodge the spear headfirst, Mila coiled and sprung up and over the obstructing plant, tilting herself forward and tucking as she went.
A ballerina is supposed to keep their vision locked on one point when they pirouette, and that skill was shared when your job was being a professional beyblade, to some extent. You just needed to keep your eye on your enemy, your prey, and dizziness would wait.
The javelin had caught the ant right at the base of its legs, punching through a joint, and its mandibles were preoccupied by a curled up, thankfully (hopefully) dead ant.
The grave digging ant was in a confused state, its not-brain unsure of how to proceed with its injury and its task, but Mila did not give it time to make a decision. Her forward spin had set her tail blade to whistling with a minor shift in tail muscles, she shifted the razor tip over just slightly and managed to guide it right across the back and side of the ant’s neck, for lack of a better term.
It was not a decapitation, exactly, but vital fluid bubbled forth freely from parted chitin and flesh as Mila stuck the landing, spinning on one foot and immediately launching herself forward, this time directly at the monster. Her left machete slammed into its foremost leg, cutting in at an angle, while her right chopped straight forward, finding the wound from her tail and cracking in deeper.
The thrashing of the ant stopped at the third chop, before it ever knew what hit it, but Mila herself only stopped after the fifth, hopping back and keeping her blades at the ready just in case.
It was unneeded, though, the gravedigger listed on its side on the ground, head at a odd angle for an ant and its payload dropped to the forest floor. Mila gave a “Done,” before skittering around the ant, wedging herself between the ant and the bush to wrench free the javelin that had snagged it. She pulled the weapon out above the corpse and trotted around, shaking the ant juice off of her own blades as she rejoined her group, Rora standing down from launching into the fray herself.
Handing the javelin back to Hughestace who accepted it with a nod and began cleaning it, Mila just shrugged. “Only one, and it was carrying a dead ant. We’re on the right track, yeah?”
“We are. We will be there in moments,” was Rora’s answer, and that’s all Mila got as the golden kobold turned away. Given the situation, fair enough, but it did sour Mila’s opinion on the eye magic a little. Rora was not usually like that, after all.
Rora was also absolutely correct. It was less than a minute later, most of which was spent struggling through a damned blackberry plant that looked to have no end in either direction, where they found their dead pile. Built up around a large tree that still had healthy leaves despite it having been turned into a monument of death, it was everything Mila had never wished for, four or five or more stories tall and just… ants.
Silent as the living versions but still in a way that unsettled. Glossy dark red and black, built high and with all manner of legs and antenna and unseeing eyes jumbled up.
It was the least welcoming sight of safety Mila could ever have the displeasure of imagining, and to see it in the flesh set Mila to heaving, just barely managing to keep her breakfast down.