If Zero didn’t get back into the fight, the trio of fourth Stage Myrmekes would decimate her forces. Thus, despite her body still screaming in pain and despite her exhaustion, she shot forward again.
Harasser’s wings were mangled, but she was still fast. Before Zero could do anything, Harasser was darting towards her subordinates- primarily, Nine, who was clearly a leader and stronger than average.
Luckily, the vast majority of Harasser’s danger levels came from its speed, which was crippled. She reckoned that a few third Stage Myrmekes would be able to hold it off, while she tied down the more dangerous Trapper and Protean.
The decision to let Harasser wriggle from her grasp meant that she was able to keep the more dangerous fourth Stage Myrmekes from slaughtering her subordinates. Zero weaved through Trapper’s enormous Articulated Arms, leapt over her fired mandibles and shot five feet into the air. Her Scorpion Stinger darted forward; stabbing towards Trapper’s remaining eye. One of its large Articulated Arms darted back and protected it, and her stinger slid off the circular limb. She bounced backwards mid-air using Trapper’s face, narrowly escaping Trapper’s hand, which had been trying to snatch her out of the air.
Zero was immediately put back into the range of Protean, and dodging its attacks wasn’t very much harder, since it lacked as many means of attacking from the ground. She narrowly avoided being caught by its Acidic Lockjaw Mandibles by darting around to its flank, stabbing her Scorpion Stinger forward. She aimed for the joint in one of its legs, where it was only lightly covered by flexible chitin.
It broke through, and she dumped as much venom into the leg as she could. Protean was turning to face her, but she moved around him fast enough to keep even with the leg. Protean was clearly aware of what she was doing, though, and leapt into the air in order to get its leg away from her scorpion stinger. She noted that the leg she’d targeted had hardly contributed to the jump at all. Her venom worked fast even on fourth Stage Myrmekes.
Protean’s weak wings worked hard to keep him hovering twenty or so feet in the air, and she was surprised to see it tear its own leg off in order to prevent the venom from spreading into the rest of its body.
Her antennae twitched, and her body tensed. Only three seconds had passed since she kicked off of Trapper, and the titanic bastard was already upon her again. Despite not having been looking Trapper’s way, she just barely managed to detect it fast enough to leap out of the way of the enormous Articulated Arm that had tried to grab at her legs.
Like this, the seconds passed. Her Springlegs retracted and popped out every other second as her needs swapped between needing good traction and the ability to move greater distances with less effort.
Her subordinates were struggling against Harasser more than she’d expected, and ten were tied down. She still had almost twenty supporting her, though, and that meant that another wave of acid descended onto the fourth Stage Myrmekes.
The acid wasn’t very powerful, once again, but that was fine. She wasn’t in need of extremely substantial support just yet, because the fight was going better than she’d expected.
Harasser was already pretty much out of the fight, and Protean wasn’t very dangerous to her. Trapper, though, had sustained very little damage to anything essential; her damage to the legs and eye were enough to make Trapper less dangerous, but hadn’t done anything to damage her raw damage potential. Moreover, Trapper’s way of fighting took significantly less energy than hers, and soon, she’d fall behind, and her subordinates would have to engage the fat fellow in melee.
That time wasn’t now, though; she still had a minute or so where she’d be in her prime. In that time, she needed to hurt Trapper in a more immediate way.
Zero wasn’t able to find any way to get through Trapper’s exoskeleton; even the flexible chitin protecting the joints would be impossible to get through before Trapper or Protean could stop her. The legs were off-limits too, for the most part, because Trapper could just throw herself on her if she did.
Thus, the only way to deal the meaningful damage she wanted to deal was to go for the face, which also happened to be the most dangerous place she could be within the entirety of Cavern 4.
Before she could commit, though, the idea behind Protean’s strange form became obvious. Zero had positioned Trapper between herself and Protean, and so it made sense when Protean seemed to try to leap over Trapper’s back. However, Zero soon discovered that she hadn’t been leaping over Trapper’s back, but onto it.
That part of her mind had already activated, and so she’d been thinking fast throughout everything… but it still wasn’t enough. A glob of acid shot from Protean’s maw at speeds that, even now, she couldn’t react to, and it struck her in the face with unerring accuracy.
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It hurts. Zero’s eyes disappeared in a mere second, and she could feel it eating into her chitin. Her mandibles and antennae began to slog off of her own face, and some of the acid had even gotten into her maw, where it shredded her throat. Her weird mental state didn’t make the pain any easier to bear, but it let her think and act through it.
Protean hadn’t been some jack-of-all-trades, ever, she realized; Protean had to have dumped at least a thousand Biomass into her acid alone, for it to so easily melt through her exoskeleton.
None of this made sense; Protean had spat acid earlier, and it hadn’t been so dangerous. Was it like the upgrade to her Springlegs that let them retract?
Her mental state let her have these useless thoughts- at least, she’d thought. Instead, even as she instinctively leaped backwards, she was slammed into from the side, by a small, fast and strong Myrmeke.
‘Harasser,’ Zero thought.
She activated Rapid Regeneration, but the acid was still on her face. Harasser tore off her arms, and they regrew and struggled to hold the Myrmeke back and away, but her face regrew only to melt in the next instant. Her Biomass reserves had to be plummeting, but she couldn’t even spare the wisp of thought to look at the System’s counter.
She shook her head rapidly and scrabbled at it with her legs, getting most of the acid off of her face but getting much of it on her, elsewhere. Only a moment after she got the acid off her face, before her face could regrow, something strange happened.
The entire cavern became horribly clear, as every single vibration through the ground was detected by her sensitive feet. Ordinarily, though, all but the heaviest vibrations were filtered to her brain… but not now. Her accelerated thinking and incredible thinking synergized for a brief second, and she noticed something…
That Harasser was desperately trying to move away, and that Trapper was still keeping a few feet of distance. Why, though?
‘Acid… more of it.’ Her body acted almost before she even understood what was happening, leaping to the side, and a moment later… she could feel through her feet the slightest of vibrations behind her, right where her head had been.
The strange jumbling of sense and thought fell apart in the next instant, and she almost staggered from how tired her mind suddenly felt. Still, she kept going; her legs moved, blindly pushing her away from where she remembered last seeing Trapper and Harasser. Protean had to be getting ready to spit more acid, though, and so she suddenly changed directions randomly a few times, hoping to make it harder to hit her.
Rapid Regeneration struggled against Protean’s absurdly powerful acid, as there was still a small amount of it on her face, and plenty of it spread throughout her body and on her legs. She briefly regained access to her vision in one eye, but lost it in the next second.
‘Wasting too much biomass,’ She thought, hesitantly deactivating the ability. Since she needed to get the acid off of her somehow, she dug her arms into the ground and, holding two massive handfuls of compressed dirt, she started to scrub the acid off of her face and legs. It was difficult to do so and move, so she decided to prioritize getting it of so that Rapid Regeneration could actually do something when she turned it off over evasion. She still moved, but not nearly as much.
Luckily, no more acid came her way- or maybe some did come her way, but none of it struck her. She was able to get the vast majority of the acid off of her, and the remainders were finally losing their potency. She activated Rapid Regeneration again, and in a second or two, she was fully healed again.
And she could see what had stopped her from getting hit again. Nine of her subordinates had charged forward without orders to do so, stalling the trio of fourth Stage Myrmekes for her sake.
Five were dead already. One of the dead was Nine, and one of the four living was One. She wouldn’t be alive much longer if she didn’t do anything.
She started forward, but the System spoke up, and the entire Cavern seemed to quiet and still for a brief second.
Batch 23 has reached the necessary number of Myrmekes: 10,000. You have all been accepte…
Lower Queen Jun, Lower Queen Burhun, Lower Queen Isis, Lower Queen Hera, Lower Queen Teris, Lower Queen Bord and Lower Queen Andromeda have intervened.
Out of the 23rd batch, only 100 will be allowed to enter the hive; struggle for supremacy, and kill your kin. Caverns 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2 will all be designated as off-limits in 48 hours.
Struggle for supremacy, and kill your kin. Do not disappoint, ‘Zero’.
She was certain beyond belief that the last message had been only shown to her. She wasn’t sure what it meant exactly, but the words pushed her forward. She’d been struggling for supremacy and killing her kin from the moment she’d been born, but the encouragement from her Queens was strangely powerful, considering her mild resentment towards them. Perhaps it was simply the nature of a Lower Myrmeke.
Zero shook her head, clearing her mind of the intervention, and moved to help her subordinates… but then, a second wave of mental exhaustion struck her as her strange mental state wore off. Her ability to process information did not even return to normal; it plummeted until she wondered if she’d been secretly lobotomized in the second she hadn’t been paying attention.
There was no way she could keep up with this fight anymore, but there was no way she was going to be calling for a retreat right then. Her mind was in shambles, and so she did as her Queens had encouraged.
“Attack. I will protect you from death.” Her pheromones spread through the Cavern like a wave.
She committed an irreversible sin; one that a more conscious Zero would’ve resented, and would resent for the rest of her life.
Every one of her subordinates surged forward, their instinctive trust in her due to their ant-like nature pushing them towards a conflict they wouldn’t be able to survive.