Chapter 38:

The first several extra ants came back to them directly and didn't attack right away. Rather, they circled around cautiously, looking at them with their eyes and waving their antennae before scurrying back to the nest. Titus and Alice pushed onward. They saw an entrance where several soldier ants were guarding as a stream of workers passed through, carrying bits and pieces of other monsters.

"I fucking hate ants! They give me the goddamn creepy crawlies," Titus said, and Alice was starting to see his point of view. The ants were weird, and she didn't like how little she knew about them. So far, they hadn't seemed hostile, but she wasn't trusting that. They got a little closer.

"The mana drain is getting much stronger," she said. It was taking a significant amount of her focus to maintain the mana inside her.

"I still can't feel anything," Titus said. Alice's brows knit together in focus as she studied him.

"It doesn't seem to be able to draw the mana out of you, but I think you won't absorb any either," she told Titus. "You're probably good to go for a very long time, but if you use a lot of mana-intensive skills, I don't know if your skills actually use mana or not. You probably notice the effects eventually, but I don't have that same sort of reserve that you do."

"I don't know if my skills use mana. Have you noticed anything?" he asked.

Alice shook her head. “The spear throwing you were doing with the duplication caused you to dim slightly, but that might have been the item, not the skill."

"I'm using my [Eagle's Vision] skill right now," Titus said, pointing at his eyes. "Are you seeing any change?"

Alice focused and saw there was some movement in the blinding currents of mana running through him, some eddies around his eyes, but nothing leaking out. "I don't see it being expended in the air, but it's doing something."

"Hmm," Titus said.

Alice had several theories running through her head, and she thought out loud. "Maybe the skill works differently than mine. Mine seems as if it doesn't actually use the mana up, but rather, the motion of the mana activates it. It's more like you have to have a certain minimum amount of mana to use the skill, but it doesn't actually drain mana from you. You can use the skill indefinitely?"

Titus shrugged. "I don't leave [Eagle's Vision] on all the time. If I do, I get a headache."

"Hmm," Alice pondered. "It seems like the skill uses some other resource that is more of a time constraint, but you need to have mana to actually activate it."

She tossed out a few other ideas about the mana being used infinitesimally or regenerating faster than she could tell, but Titus was only half-listening. Alice was fine with that. She wasn't exactly talking to him; she was just trying to think as she attempted to unravel the mysteries of magic. She was a computer scientist, not a physicist. Still, even a deeper understanding of the nature of reality probably wouldn't have helped her with this.

That wasn't to say she didn't have a drive to understand the fundamental laws of the universe. She figured most scientists did, and just the particular field might interest them more than another one. Well, she'd thought computer science was her field, but how could it compete with honest-to-gods magic?

The third time the ants took interest in them wasn't like the first two. The whole time they had been moving closer, ants had been running to and from the nest. Each time they made a move, more and more came. When soldiers started to come up to them, clacking their mandibles menacingly without slowing down, Alice started to get a bad feeling about it.

"I think I know what they were doing," Alice said, stopping and tugging on Titus's sleeve. He looked at her, holding his pilum ready to throw into the crowd of ants rushing towards them.

"Does it matter?" Titus asked.

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Alice shrugged. "Maybe they're laying pheromone trails. They must have been reinforcing it and getting soldiers to come fight the prey. It's not exactly like I know much about ants, but this seems to be more monstrous. They probably would have just attacked us, right?"

"I don't know," Titus flung his pilum. In the air, she watched as the mana rippled out of him, and the weapon duplicated into a full volley, smashing down the front rank of ants. But it didn't slow them one bit, as the rear ants just moved over the corpses of their fallen sisters and continued to charge, heedless of the chaos.

Titus resummoned the enchanted weapon to his hand and flung it again. Alice watched as another wave of ants fell, but it had only slowed them down very slightly. It took too long for him to cast and recast. She reached out a hand and fired a mana bolt into the horde. It was even more futile, but a single shot to the head was enough to destroy the ant. The ants were not high-level, and they were not necessarily powerful in any sense of the word, but they were numerous.

Hundreds of them were bearing down at this point, and even the ones that were just going about their business blocks over were starting to be interested in the scent or whatever it was that was attracting them. Alice activated her [Life Drain] skill at its maximum capacity, targeting the three nearest ants and letting the skill take care of that. The ants slowed down almost imperceptibly, and she could feel herself speed up slightly as the life and mana poured into her at a disappointing trickle. It was still a low-level skill, but if she had changed it up, maybe it would have been more useful.

All the while, she tried to stay close to Titus as they backed up and he threw his spear over and over again, causing indiscriminate waves of death. She only picked off the ones coming from the sides or those the volleys somehow missed as they struggled to maintain distance.

"We need to get a car," Alice told Titus, looking around. "These ants are gaining on us."

The issue was that it had been several days, and they needed a specific kind of car. Older cars that had their keys in the ignition either ran out of gas a day or so ago, or their batteries were dead. Newer cars were more viable, especially those that were push-to-start. Oftentimes, they would turn off themselves if the engine idled long enough or if the lights were left on. But a good number of drivers kept the key fob in their pockets or on their bodies, and when they were teleported out for the tutorial, it was not left in the car.

Now, well, she could probably guess that the cars that were new enough, but it would still be a 50/50 chance if they would be able to get it to start. Titus seemed to agree, though, as he let loose another volley.

"Start looking. I'll hold them off," Titus called back.

Alice turned and dashed, reaching and popping open driver's side doors on any car that looked like it was newer than 2015 and pressing the start button for a second, hoping to get some sort of response. It took four tries before she found a convertible that roared to life as she pressed the start button.

"Titus!" she called. Looking down at the controls, she saw three pedals on the floor. "Fuck! Titus, you're going to have to drive," she said as she crawled over the console and hopped into the passenger seat, the engine already running.

Titus was half a second behind her, slipping in and shifting. "You're going to need to learn how to drive stick," he said as his foot operated the clutch.

"That's not important right now," Alice said as she checked the rearview mirrors. The wave of ants came closer. Tires squealed as Titus drove the narrow convertible through gaps between other cars that a bigger vehicle wouldn't have been able to slip through.

Even still, they lost both rearview mirrors almost instantly, and the doors were dented as they scraped along. Alice was just glad the airbags hadn't gone off. Moments later, when she checked back around, the ants were falling away. But one of the ants had managed to grab hold of their bumper with its mandibles, holding on tight for dear life as they sped along, its legs dragging on the ground.

Alice reached back and fired a bolt at it, but the swerving car caused her to miss and hit the trunk. A sizzling hole appeared in the back end, and she suddenly had an idea. "Titus," she said, "pop the trunk."

"What?" he asked.

"Pop the trunk," she repeated. He reached over, pressing a button, and the trunk flipped up, the ant coming with it, but its weight caused it to dip down and slam shut.

Alice smiled. "Successful capture," she said as she slipped back into the front seat from where she had crawled to the back to slam the lid down. She could hear the ant thumping and chewing on the metal. Still, they'd have a few minutes before it could get out if it was even possible for it to grip the little pull tab that would open the trunk from the inside.

"Why didn't you just kill it?" Titus asked. "You're gonna have to catch up in levels again," he said.

Alice looked over his head and saw that he was now level 19. "Damn it," she said. "Two levels from that. Those ants were so low."

"Yeah, but I killed almost 100 of them," Titus said with a smile.

Alice grimaced. She wasn't really jealous, but it was frustrating. "So, another odd prime. What are you going to pick for your skill?"

Titus didn’t say anything.

"Titus?" Alice asked, frowning,

"I didn't actually get a skill option."

"What?"