As Octavia descended to retrieve me, I scanned the Shimmergrove, looking for any other signs of moving light. As I spotted more armor ants carrying glowstone shards of varying sizes, I saw a consistent pattern: nearly all of them seemed to be coming from a specific corner of the Shimmergrove, either walking away with glowstone lofted above them, or — less clearly illuminated — heading back in a row to retrieve more of the glowstone. Some of the shards were tiny enough for a single ant to carry them, while some chunks were large enough that several ants had to tandem-carry them. Whether by intention or not, they had apparently stumbled upon a rich deposit of loose glowstone, and evidently they intended to make an excavation project of it.

It was somehow reminiscent of one of my earliest encounters with armored ants, when I had spotted a group of them making off with the remains of a turtle. Everything about the Shimmergrove felt inverted, from the way the plants bent to the walls or floor to absorb light, to the way that shadows were cast upward wherever anything blocked the light of the Shimmergrove floor. However, the behavior of the ants remained constant, even when the thing they were picking apart and carrying back home was entirely inorganic. It still left me with the lingering question: why? What did armored ants need with glowstone?

Even as the overwhelming majority of the ants converged on the deposit of loose glowstone, I still spotted a few stragglers straying far off the beaten path. It was what ants did: their numbers meant that, even after stumbling upon a desirable cache, they could still have ants wandering out and about looking for something better. Even if the scout ants were wandering about aimlessly, they were just the appendages of a larger collective that was striving upward and onward, taking low-hanging fruit (or glowstone deposits) where it found them, but never fully satisfied with what it had in the present.

Maybe there was a lesson to be learned from the ants. For most of my life as a dragon, I had been fighting so desperately for survival that my priority was almost always on surviving the next day. Whenever faced with the question of how to spend my resources — be it time, or the opportunity to learn new abilities — I only thought as far ahead as the next day, the next battle, the next brush with death. And where had it left me? I was a dragon, perched atop a tree, living in fear of centipedes — literal insects — because my scales weren't even as strong as the chitin exoskeleton of a common armored ant.

I had, admittedly, mastered the power of speech. That was useful — I had no regrets there. But now that Octavia and I seemed at least somewhat secure in our existence, perhaps now was the time for me to think more about the type of dragon I really wanted to be. It was, at least, something for me to contemplate while waiting for Octavia's return. The black armored ants were clearly gearing up for some ambitious project; they were planning to do something with that glowstone. The red fire ants seemed to have a similar capacity for ambitious projects, like exterminating species that they deemed to be a threat. Did I really have less ambition than the ants?

I looked down at a scuttling centipede below. If that was really the most intimidating creature this place had to offer, I had very little in the way of competition if I truly wanted to dominate the ecosystem, if only I picked the right way to go about it. My investment in breath attacks had earned me abilities that could easily slay any creature foolish enough to enter a prolonged fight with me and offer me the courtesy of not fleeing. That might be all well and good against slower creatures: I could easily overtake a tortoise, despite its large HP reserves. But the fire ants that had been a thorn in my side were nearly the opposite of a tortoise: where the tortoise was an armored creature whose biggest weakness was its lack of speed, the insects were agile creatures that were so poorly armored that a single claw-strike could slay them.

The armored ants…well, they had the best of both worlds. Agility and enough armor to withstand a claw strike. Though, while my claw strength had been somewhat stagnant, my mouth's strength had grown by leaps and bounds since the first time I'd encountered them. Maybe I actually was better positioned to best an armored ant than I had been previously.

I glanced up toward Octavia who, by my estimation, was more than a minute away. I looked down, and spotted an armored ant — one of the "scouts" that was unconcerned with the glowstone deposit — who had wandered under my tree. Perhaps now was a good time for an experiment.

I climbed down several branches, and pounced on the armored ant from a height of several feet — not the first time I had tried this maneuver, though most of my ant-pounces had been significantly more horizontal. The ant squirmed, and I attacked it with my teeth: the armored ant's thickest sections were too large for me to unhinge my jaw and bite down on it, but that wasn't enough to stop me. The ends of my jagged ends of my front teeth easily sunk through the first few millimeters of the ant's exoskeleton, not enough to penetrate it, but enough to grip it. I bit down, as though I were taking a bite out of an apple. The angle of the bite made it harder to crack it, and for a moment I was afraid that my teeth would shatter before the ants did, but to my surprise and delight, its chitin exoskeleton let out a *crunch* as I forced my teeth together. Black ichor oozed from the hole that I had made, and for a brief moment, the ant's legs twitched, then stopped.

[Armored ant defeated! Gained 2% exp toward next level]

I quickly gobbled up the ant, then looked upward. My ride had arrived, and it would be bad manners for me to keep her waiting any longer. I ambled up the tree and into the web cradle Octavia had prepared for me.

"What were you doing?" she asked.

"Grabbing a quick bite to eat," I said. "And more importantly, experimenting."

"Working on a plan?" she asked, lifting me out of the tree and beginning the slow ascent.

"Sort of," I said. "I was thinking about the future, and what kind of dragon I want to be."

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"And what kind of dragon might that be?"

"I…" I paused, thinking back to the tortoise, and then to the fire ants. "Well, I was thinking that the thing I'm optimized for is maybe the opposite of what I should be optimized for."

"How do you mean?" she asked.

"I guess I've spent a lot of time trying to make myself more lethal," I said. "But maybe I'm already lethal enough. Maybe what I really need to focus on is survival. Defense over offense."

"I've heard it said that the best defense is a good offense," said Octavia

"Just because you've heard it said doesn't mean that it's true," I said. "I could just as easily say that the best offense is a good defense."

"And would that be more accurate?"

"Maybe," I said. "I mean, that's basically what tanks are, right? It's easier to roll across a battlefield when you're covered with armor. Tanks don't have better guns than artillery — stationary artillery guns have more firepower than tanks, pound for pound. But the advantage that tanks have is that they can roll right up to the enemy, and that allows them to be deployed offensively in ways that stationary guns can't." I thought for a moment. "Same goes for an armored knight, now that I think about it."

"Too bad there aren't any blacksmiths around here looking for work," she said.

I glanced down at the scales that covered my forelegs. "I was planning on going the au naturale route anyway. Seems like one of my most natural advantages, if I put the work in." I looked past my own legs toward the movement of glowing rocks below. Even though we were now too high for me to pick out the shape of individual ants, I could still make out their movement by the dance of the shadows as they carried the glowing rocks across the Shimmergrove floor. From this vantage point, I could now make out a more complete view of the path they walked, as the glowstone fragments painted a trail from the floor of the Shimmergrove, up and around the spiraling perimeter of the basin that carved a path upward. In fact, at the rate they were going…

"Say," I said to Octavia. "Do you reckon those ants are headed to the same place we're headed?"

"What ants?" Her voice seemed tense.

"Not fire ants," I said. "The armored ants. See the bobbing light? They're carrying glowstone."

"Oh," she said. "Why would they be going to the same place we are?"

"They're following the same path. See where they're walking? That's where we would have walked if we'd followed the trail all the way down to the Shimmergrove, rather than doing what we're doing now, right?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "I suppose it is the same path, in a sense. In fact, those ants are part of the reason that I wanted to do things the way I did. See where their trail vanishes?" She pointed.

I did my best to follow where she was pointing. I assumed that, had I possessed better eyesight, I might have been able to see whatever tunnel it was that the ants were escaping into. As it was, all I could see was that the upward spiraling procession of glowstone just seemed to end at a certain point as the trail of ants disappeared…somewhere. Wherever it led, that entrance was far below the point we had rappelled from, and on almost the opposite end of the basin.

"What do you suppose they're using that glowstone for?" I asked.

"I assume they're building something."

"Yes, but what?" I asked, slightly annoyed. "Have you ever seen ants working on a glowstone building project?"

"No," she said. "I don't interact with the armored ants very much. And the fire ants seem to treat glowstone like any other rock, for the most part."

As we neared our destination, I could smell the sweet, pungent odor of the melons, and I looked upward. "Do they always smell that strong?" I asked.

"Only when you crack them open."

"Oh." I recalled the melon that I had dropped down a small embankment and punctured. "Sorry about the melon mishap."

"No worries," she said. "It's an easy problem to solve. I'll just eat that one first."

"I suppose it's not the first time that I subjected you to an unpleasant odor," I said, recalling the time that Octavia had felt the need to comment on the smelliness of my [noxious breath]. "Luckily it's just an unpleasant odor."

Several moments later, we reached the top. Octavia lifted herself onto the cliff's edge, and then pulled me up afterward.

The first thing I saw was the web trap that Octavia had encased the melons in. I was about to comment on it, but then I saw the likely reason for her web trap: a group of half a dozen armored ants was scuttling around at the edge of it, apparently very interested in the melons, but none curious enough to enter Octavia's web. Their interest seemed to center on one specific melon that was surrounded by a patch of wetness where it had leaked a trail of juice. Apparently, we weren't the only ones who could smell the flesh of the melon through its punctured rind.

I glanced at Octavia. "Sorry about the melon mishap," I said again.

"No worries," she said. "It's an easy problem to solve." She took a step toward the ants, baring her fangs, and the ants retreated a short distance away. I watched, expecting them to return to their brethren on the lower path, but they simply sat there, watching.

I glanced at the ants, then looked back at Octavia, who was knitting something new together, a bit like the carrying sling she'd put together earlier, but with a few modifications. "Stay still," she said. "And tilt your head back." I obliged, and she looped several thick strands around my neck. "Now lift your foreclaws." She tugged at the bit that she had looped around my neck, and tied it around what was essentially my elbow joint. "There. Can you pull those without them bouncing too much?"

I took a few steps forward, watching the silk bag of melons dragging behind me. "I guess this can work," I said.

"I'll keep an eye on the rear and help you if there's any jagged rocks, but if you see anything sharp, let me know," she said. "And if you need to abandon the melons for any reason, you should be able to bite through the fabric on your forelegs."

"Got it," I said. I glanced at the armored ants, who were still watching us from a distance away. It was difficult to see their dark shells this far away from the Shimmergrove's illumination, but their silhouettes were unmistakable.

"Should we be worried about them?" I asked.

"No," she said. "But we should hurry."

"You're saying we shouldn't be worried about them, but also it's really urgent that we get away from them?"

"It's not them I'm worried about," she said. "Ants are often the first responders when a food source pops up. But they're not the only ones that can be drawn in by the scent of fruit juice."

I looked behind me at the one leaky fruit, then looked at Octavia, repeating my apology. "Sorry about the melon mishap."