Adon ran.
He ran with a reckless abandon that had his body slowing and weakening remarkably quickly. Fortunately, there were a few seconds when he was outside of the ants’ view—or at least they were outside of his. He had to assume they couldn’t see him, since he couldn’t see them.
Curse these eyes! If I could only see the environment better, maybe I could figure out a real escape plan…
But in the brief reprieve when he couldn’t see the ants, he felt compelled to throw all 9 of the Evolution Points he’d earned into Agility and Constitution. Those would help him run faster and further. Escape would have to take precedence over vision for now.
A second after he dismissed his Status sheet, his pursuers emerged from the edge of his field of vision, coming from behind a thick tangle of tall grass. Then Adon was running again. His body was more made for climbing up and down plants than running on the ground, he could tell now, but there was nothing for that. His wiggly run was at least faster than the ants’ run with their shorter legs.
He felt, when he had the room in his head to think about it, like a fugitive leading a prison break through the jungle. Except that he was alone. He had apparently planned this prison break for just himself.
Damn, I’m lonely. It was a bad sign that he found himself envying the camaraderie among imaginary convicts.
He ran and ran, but he still couldn’t outrun the isolation that had surrounded him since his birth. Am I going to die without ever having made a friend in this world? he wondered. Without ever even having communicated with another living thing?
He tried to find things to celebrate even in his rather desperate situation. With his increased speed and stamina, it seemed he could stay one step ahead of the ants. At least for now.
It would have been surprising if that hadn’t been enough. If the numbers directly correlated to his actual speed and stamina, then both should have roughly tripled.
But the ants kept coming.
Running further and faster didn’t seem to slow them down. They must have deep reserves of Constitution indeed. Or perhaps their larger size relative to the ants he’d seen before was responsible. These thick-bodied sentries probably had a lot more Biomass coming their way on a daily basis, so they would be strong enough for missions like this. An anthill was an efficient system for the delivery of resources from the outside to the important creatures within it.
And now he’d pissed that whole little ecosystem off.
Adon tried zigging and zagging through the thick tangle of shrubs, grass, flowers, and other plants, but the ants seemed to have better vision than he did. He couldn’t get far enough away for them to be unable to track him. Either that, or they were following him by scent.
He really didn’t want to believe that was the answer, because if it was, this would be a situation where he could run but not hide. He couldn’t run forever, after all. It wasn’t as if their antennae would tire of smelling for his scent.
As he ran more frantically, Adon began to find the ants around corners when he tried his zigzagging maneuvers.
The first time that happened, he stopped and killed two so he could get through. They were bigger than the ants he’d fought before, but fueled by adrenaline, and with his speed and stamina elevated, he could move a bit more quickly than they could react.
He ripped their heads off with his mandibles. He took an extra bite or two of the corpses while he had a moment. It was hard to turn down the Biomass, especially when he was beginning to feel weak.
Munch munch. Chomp chomp. Gobble gobble. Gulp.
But all that he’d done was slow himself down. More ants poured out from behind the leaves and stems around him, and Adon found himself running again. Now with less of a margin of safety.
When the same encounter happened again a few minutes later, as he tried to hook a quick left turn, Adon didn’t make the same mistake. Killing these two would only slow him down again. He pivoted and kept running straight forward.
How had they caught up to him again? How were those ants waiting around that corner?
Once could be a coincidence, but twice?
They weren’t faster than him. Had the little bugs outsmarted him?
No, that can’t be it. Crap! I should’ve just run in a straight line, as far and as fast as I could. They must know the terrain better than him. And with their sheer numbers, they could afford to spread their search out across a wider area. With the primitive intelligence of an almost hive minded species, they were trying to force him to waste energy, and perhaps make a mistake.
Just need to get as far away as I can. If I get far enough from their hill, it won’t be worth the trouble to keep chasing me! It was a desperate thought, but he was desperate now.
But it seemed unlikely that he would make it. He had been concerned about it for a while now, but the weakness in his body returned. There was a feeling of hollowness inside.
He felt himself slowing down. It wasn’t surprising, even if it was horrifying. The chase had lasted for what he estimated was at least an hour in his old world’s time.
He had seen how insects could lie still for hours in many of his past lives. He suspected that this body wasn’t built for distance running. Even if keeping up with exercise had been an implicit part of his new life resolutions. And if his new body had something like adrenaline, it was just about used up.
He checked his Status screen. His Biomass was down to 1/15.
Well, that was just about it, wasn’t it? He was consuming all the stuff that he was made up of. And if he remembered the system explanation of Biomass correctly, once he hit 0/15, he would start losing Health instead. The ants wouldn’t even need to kill him if they could just keep him running. They would get to harvest his body in the end.
I did get far, though, didn’t I?
He felt a bit perversely proud. He had noted a few landmarks as he moved, but he was now in a completely unexplored section of this jungle—or this space that felt like a jungle to him.
This was never going to be an easy life, but at least I got to see a little patch of this massive world. I could’ve died right where I was born, if that Ladybug Larva got me. Even if I only got one day, it was a beautiful day.
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As he was slowing due to fatigue and taking in the metaphorical roses, Adon noticed something in the air that he hadn’t seen in this world yet. A sort of silvery shimmer. Something that drew his eye even with his terrible vision.
Huh. I think I know what that is. Normally, if he was right, this was something he would avoid as an insect. But what did he have left to lose?
If it turned out well, maybe he’d save himself—or at least deny the ants the satisfaction of getting his body. If it went poorly, well, he was dead anyway. Might as well play the last card he had.
With the last burst of energy he could muster, Adon dashed forward. Toward the silvery shimmer. The web.
As he moved, he realized that the ants were all around him now. Literally all around. Not just chasing behind him and trying to flank him from the sides. Also on the plants above him. Crawling from plant to plant, trying to get above him and all around him.
It felt like the ant army was a single organism trying to swallow him up.
Even running, he was sometimes running in the shade of their bodies. It reminded him of when he’d thought of himself, for a moment, as a fugitive. The authorities chasing him even had what felt like a little air force, minus the helicopter noises, which he added in his head.
The aerial pursuit became less amusing when they started leaping down at him from their elevated perches. Most of the occasional suicidal jumpers missed and smacked into the ground, rolling along stunned by the impact as he left them in his wake. Others struck Adon’s body and bounced off. But as he neared where he thought the shimmer should be, a couple of them secured places on Adon’s back. They immediately began biting his back with their mandibles and spraying him with the same sort of vinegary gas attack that had choked him up earlier.
Fortunately, the ants that had landed on him weren’t among the biggest of the sentries. Maybe that was why they’d been sent to scout in the trees. Or how they’d ended up in the front. They were lighter weight.
But the passengers were no picnic to deal with.
His vision blurring, his body slowing, part of Adon just wanted to stop and let the ants kill him. Clearly, they wanted this more than he wanted to stay alive.
So what? You should just lay down and die? No! Just have to keep going. You’re so close. Run a little further. You can do it…
A thousand regrets from his last life propelled the caterpillar forward in those last moments. Adon ran beyond his physical endurance. Beyond the moment when his Biomass dropped to nothing.
And suddenly, the silvery shimmer swam up at him from out of nowhere.
The exhausted caterpillar barely managed to react in time. He threw himself flat against the ground and let the momentum carry him.
His body slid and rolled and scraped against the rough, rocky ground underneath the web. It tore up his underbelly pretty badly, but on the bright side, the bad landing also threw the ants off of him.
He landed facing up at the sky. There was a beautiful, silvery, shimmering web overhead, between him and the open air. Adon could feel he wouldn’t be able to move very well now. But he wanted to smile.
That web is so beautiful. I don’t even need color vision to appreciate it, either. If I die now, at least I’ll die looking at something gorgeous.
Then a long, thick shadow appeared above him, blocking the light. It was a shadow made up of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of individual pieces. He’d never gotten a really good count on the sheer number of ants chasing him. And it had seemed to increase as the pursuit went on.
I was wrong to think you were the bottom of the insect food chain, Adon thought. You guys must be the roughest gang in these parts.
A second shadow appeared on his other side. The ants chasing him from the tops of the plants on that side had formed their own wave.
Overkill much?
The two waves of ants that hovered over the web smashed down toward Adon, and he instinctively averted his eyes. He didn’t want to see death coming. The web must have been secured to some of the heavier rocks around him, though, because he felt the structure shaking only a little as the pile of ants landed.
He waited a moment, expecting their massive weight to collapse the web down onto him.
And waited.
Finally, he peeked. The anticipation was killing him, since he was expecting the army of little monsters to literally kill him.
What he saw was almost beautiful in its own right. As if the aesthetic appeal of the spider’s web wasn’t enough, it had also proved incredibly sturdy against the onslaught of ants. They were stuck there, perhaps a hundred of them.
Well, some of them were stuck.
As he watched, Adon saw that many of the ants were still moving on the web. Almost as many were moving freely as were stuck, actually. More got stuck every second, but more of the little sentries were following after their predecessors. It took him a second to realize what the ants that were free were doing, still crawling around on the web.
But then he realized. They were pulling at their fellows, chomping on the web.
They’re doing whatever they can to try to set the other ants free, Adon realized. Even if I don’t think they’re very smart, wasting all these resources chasing me, it’s remarkable what they’ll do for each other. Admirable. I wish I had that…
He had a moment of self-pity, as the sight reminded him that he was still alone here. That he had still never so much as communicated with another living thing. Could still die alone and unloved.
Then he felt searing pain on multiple sides. Ow. Ow, what the fuck?!
Adon turned his head and saw three ants on his left side. Judging from the pain he felt, there were at least three on his right side too. It looked like a few had fallen through the gaps in the spider’s web after all.
He irritably reached out and decapitated the nearest ant with his mandibles. Then the next. They could hardly move to avoid him, he realized as he sat up and continued the killing spree. And they weren’t trying to either. Each ant seemed to see it as its mission to deplete his Health as much as it could before expiring.
Adon helped them achieve that goal by staying relatively still while he killed them. He didn’t have the energy to run anymore, and he was fed up with letting these things chase him anyway. They were smaller than he was, and they didn’t have any attacks he hadn’t seen. And now that he’d invested in his Agility, they seemed surprisingly slow.
The fight took a few minutes, during which they did a fair amount of surface damage to Adon’s body and drastically widened the gash in his side, which was now leaking out an ominous amount of clear liquid.
But he’d done it. He’d killed over a dozen ants that slipped through the spider web and got to him.
All that effort, he thought, for just this lousy pool of blood. None of you bastards are going to get to eat me anyway. Not even a nibble! It was all for nothing.
He began eating the ants all around him, ignoring the slowing activities of the ants in the web overhead. Most of them were trapped, anyway, but the other large contingent were working on freeing their brethren, clearly not thinking about Adon for the moment.
And Adon was so hungry. As he swallowed the first piece of ant flesh, he began to feel just a bit better about all this. His mind relaxed. He went into a feeding trance.
Munch munch. Chomp chomp. Gobble gobble. Gulp.
He engulfed the last of the sentry ants. This was just a little one, and Adon was able to swallow it whole.
He finally looked back up at the ants caught in the spider’s trap. They were still locked in a desperate struggle to free themselves and their comrades from the web.
I’d love to be able to go up into that web and eat the rest of them, he thought.
His Biomass was topped up, but he was going to spend a lot of it healing up this wound, he was sure. It would be nice to have some reserves.
As he had that thought, his eyes detected a flicker of quick, sharp movement from the top of the web.
A big, fast-moving shape striding briskly across a spider’s web. Yeah, no need to call the detectives in to solve this one. Adon had no doubts what that was.
He tried to hold very still so as not to catch the monster’s eye.