Erya woke up in a body that did not feel like her own. Her white and tender skin got replaced by a black and a hardened one. Her eyes had turned crimson red, and all her teeth had become sharper.

Erya opened her eyes. While she was aware that the place did not have the slighted hint of light, she still managed to see her way as if its daytime.

Where am I ? Erya thought

Erya's memory at this moment was akin to a blank page. She could not remember a thing, her parents, friends, village, not even her name. The only thing she could recall was that she was once a human, but now she is not.

Terrified, Erya tried to stand up in panic but as soon as she did she fell. She instinctively felt that she should have had two legs and two hands, instead, she now has six legs.

Erya now looked at her surroundings. The wall of the room was entirely made out of hardened clay and had twelve large holes that she could comfortably fit in, but beyond that, she knew nothing.

After a few minutes, Erya suddenly started to hear many footsteps heading her way through the twelve wall holes. In which after a few seconds, twelve six-legged beings that looked similar to her new body surrounded her. The only physical difference Erya could notice is that her body had a hint of red and had more curvature.

"What do you all want?" Erya asked. "What have you done to my body? I was not like this..."

"Elder! Elder!," said the eleven out of the twelve beings surrounding Erya. They were looking at the last person amongst them with a much older body than the rest in the room.

This person, supposedly known as the elder, walked toward Erya, sat beside her on a large leaf and crossed all his six legs together and said, "You seem to be confused, Gyne. In any case allow me to explain the situation you are in, after all, it is rude not to introduce myself before a precious guest like you."

Me? A precious guest? Erya thought.

"My name is Randam, and you may also call me elder if you want. And this room is the guest chamber in our underground kingdom Elajra. My scouts had seen you above the ground unconscious, and after examining you, have found out that you are actually a Gyne and brought you here."

"A Gyne?" asked Erya. "What is a Gyne? Is it my name?"

"So you are not even aware what your name is... I suppose that leaves me no choice but to treat you as a newborn," said Elder Randam. "Very well, let us start with your emotions and your senses. Tell me do you feel any hunger right now, like a desire to eat?"

"I do feel this kind of painful emptiness in my belly," replied Erya. "Is that what you mean?"

"Good," replied Randam. "Bring her the finest food we have."

One of the eleven behind Randam left the guest chamber, and came back after a few minutes with living baby worms in blue and red over a large green leaf, then laid it on the ground beside Erya.

"These are one of the rarest and finest delicacies that you can have across all of Metzra," said Randam. "Please, do not worry about us and eat till the pain you spoke of goes away."

Erya followed the elder's words and bit into the worms. They had such juicy and tender texture that made her devour the food in no time, while the eleven looked at her in hope to have a single bite of the food."

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Once Erya finished eating she said, "thank you, I did not expect it to be this delicious."

"That is what everyone says the first time they taste it," replied Randam. "Now tell me if you do not mind, did the pain go away?"

"Yes the pain in my belly went away," replied Erya. "But it was replaced by another pain in the middle of my chest."

"As I thought," replied Randam. "To us antigers, we consider the pain in the belly to be a physical one. This is why after you ate and satisfied your physical hunger it disappeared. However, the pain in your chest is different. Now I know how to stop the pain but to give the explanation its justice, I have to tell you a brief tale of who we are, the antigers."

"Alright," said Erya who wanted to fill at least a few blank pages in her memory.

"You see we are advanced beings created from two primitive ones, an ant and a tiger," said Randam. "We had long sought for a way to understand when, how, who, or why we were made from such beings in the first place, but we are yet to find a reliable answer for any of that. Every antiger generation that came presented its theory about our origins and disagreed with the one that came before it. In fact, I will probably keep wondering about our origins until the day I die."

"And what is the theory that the antigers believe in today?" asked Erya.

"There are those beings that we call the Dragans," the elder replied. "No one has seen them, but they claim to have made us and the other two hybrids, the fronkeys and the horsenakes. Now I believe you will ask me how is that we know about the Dragans without ever seeing them?"

"Indeed, that was what I was about to ask you," replied Erya.

"Well, that is because they use their servants, known as dervants, to communicate to all the three hybrid races. The dervants have done much to our history, and unfortunately, all their acts are tainted with blood. They have destroyed all our records and each antiger who knew about our pre-Dragan days. So we are unaware of anything that happened two thousand years ago beside mere gossip and rumors."

"But for what purpose are they doing all of this?" asked Erya.

"They do it to force us and all the other hybrids to worship their Dragan masters. Large armies of hybrids have waged wars against them only to be slaughtered in a blink of an eye. The dervants are simply unstoppable. Unfortunately, we eventually gave in and ended up worshipping the Dragans with our tongues and limbs, but at least without our hearts..."

I wonder how much suffering this elder has gone through, Erya thought.

"It would be appropriate now to go back to your situation," said Randam. "According to our remaining records, we were told that every thousand years an abnormal female antiger appears, one that our predecessors came to call as a Gyne. A Gyne is akin to an ant queen that is capable of giving birth to an incredible amount of antigers. This is very beneficial for us because the birth rate of female and male antigers are quite imbalanced; a single female is born for every five males. Besides, it takes five pregnancy years for a single antiger to be born. So you can imagine how tough it is for our female citizens."

"And I suppose that me, a Gyne can balance these scales?" asked Erya.

"Correct," replied Randam. "We were told that a Gyne is capable of giving birth of a hundred antigers in a single day, thousands of times faster than the normal birthrate speed. Also, a Gyne is even capable of giving birth to different antiger species that have only come to hear about in our records. Now, do you realize why you are such a precious guest?"

"You want me to give birth to hundreds of antigers daily?" asked Erya. "My body won't be able to keep up with such madness. Please do not force me, I beg you."

"Force you?" asked the elder with a queer laugh. "No, we won't. In fact, it is you who would be begging us to keep giving birth. The slight pain you speak of in your chest will not subsidize, and will soon become unbearable that you will have no choice but to start breeding. Your body will be more than capable of keeping up with it for your whole body, perhaps even your whole existence was intended to produce. Remember that you should not resist, for nothing good ever comes in going against one's nature."

The pain is indeed growing sharper, thought Erya. Initially, it felt like an uncomfortable tickle, but in just a few minutes it started to feel like someone is grinding his fingernails inside her ribcage. I suppose I should try, after all, I have no idea what they would do to me if I resisted.

"You came at such a great timing Gyne," said Randam, spreading his crossed legs in delight. "Two decades ago the War of Hope had killed millions of our antigers, including every elder beside me. But with you on our side, we can recover more than what we have lost, and eradicate both the fronkeys and horsenakes while they are still licking their war wounds."

Without anyone forcing her, Erya gave birth to six thousand antigers in her first month. In the second month, she gave birth to twelve thousand that the antigers started to complain since it became too tiresome to count.