Tearing off and tossing away his arm hurt Ackster both physically and emotionally since he was certain his regeneration skills weren’t powerful enough to regenerate it. But it wasn’t all bad. It served as excellent bait to distract the worker ants hounding him like rabid flies. The queen had also partly lost focus, and it seemed like she was conflicted about the arm and Ackster elbow her.
The relative benefits didn’t stop there. Along with the arm, Ackster had also lost a bunch of weight and surface area. He weighed less and could thus move around more easily. It would also be more difficult for the ant queen to land a blow on his right side now that his arm was no longer there to catch it.
Ackster used forceful reasoning like that as he crouched down slightly with his remaining fist pressed to his body, coiled like a spring. His loose arm had bought him some time, but Ackster was still running out of it. And he had to end this battle as quickly as possible.
So, he gathered all his strength in his legs.
All of his skills harmonized with his body to deliver the maximum power possible. Then, Limit Breaker joined the party and brought the power levels beyond what Ackster’s body was physically capable of.
After gathering all his strength, Ackster knew that delaying would only tire and weaken him, so he shot off the ground and up toward the ant queen’s underbelly like launched from a trebuchet.
While the ant queen was tall, her underbelly wasn’t that much further above the ground than Ackster’s head, which was why he could punch her so easily. And now that he jumped, he reached her exoskeleton with ease.
But Ackster didn’t only reach it.
After all the damage he had inflicted during his dance with the queen and her workers, a sudden, full-power strike was enough to break through it.
Ackster’s fist smashed through the hard carapace and reached the soft insides of the ant queen’s thorax, where her heart was.
The ant queen was large, so even after piercing his arm into her thorax, Ackster didn’t immediately find the heart. But as long as there was an opening and he could reach inside, he could unleash as much damage as necessary. So, before he slipped out again, he clawed and tore with his fingers like a dog faced with an especially rude backyard.
And when he felt himself falling back down, he grabbed whatever he could and pulled it back out with him.
The hole was just small enough for him to lodge his arm in and use his muscles to wedge himself stuck. But the cracks spread and widened the hole, so he fell down to the ground, clutching a lump of soft tissue.
Ackster hastily threw it in his mouth before bouncing back up like a rubber ball and repeating the process multiple times.
He paid no attention to the ant queen’s screams, the returning worker ants, or the blood gushing down his stump. All of those things were irrelevant distractions. If Ackster didn’t focus wholeheartedly on tearing apart the queen’s insides, he would die. So, that’s what he did. He shut out the rest of the world and did the bare minimum, such as kick and stomp on the ants that got in his way, as he mangled the queen’s thorax until he couldn’t reach any more soft tissue.
He had scraped the area around the hole he made clean. But that wasn’t all he had done.
With the ant queen’s fervent movements and the loss of balance that came with the loss of an arm, Ackster had missed the hole on more than one occasion and, in the process, made new ones or expanded it.
The ant queen’s thorax had lost enough of its structural integrity. A couple of more punches was all it took for Ackster to make it collapse.
The ant queen buckled like a bridge with its middle support pillars removed and folded down on Ackster, who remained where he was. He could move out of the way. But he didn’t. He couldn’t let go of this prime opportunity to access all of the ant queen’s insides.
He faced the incoming ant queen’s body with a raised arm and slightly bent knees to brace himself as he used his body to break into the ant queen’s thorax, or what remained of it.
With the ant queen’s body covering him, the faint light from the stones in the ceiling had no hope of reaching Ackster. It was absolutely pitch-black, and Ackster didn’t even know if his eyes were open or closed. He hoped they were closed, however, since he didn’t want them to fill up with the blood and juices of the queen’s insides.
And so, with eyes closed, body riddled with cuts, scrapes, and injuries, and with a missing arm, Ackster went to town on the ant queen from within her. He punched, kicked, scratched, and bit everything that came in his path, aiming to deal as much destruction as possible now that he had finally gotten an opportunity to vent the anger he felt at the ant queen taking his arm.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
And with the ant queen’s body encapsulating him, he was safe both from the queen herself and the other ants.
He lost himself in a dazed rampage and only came to once he realized that the only reason the ant queen’s body was moving was due to him. Ackster felt around, and he could tell that he had practically emptied out the ant queen’s midsection by instinctively eating everything soft enough to go down his gullet.
He briefly got worried that his instincts had grown to incorporate something so barbaric. But he had to admit that it was a good thing. It was also something he had started working toward, making his body act on its own without his constant supervision.
Ackster took a deep breath and heaved an even deeper sigh before he, still panting, decided to try and find his way out of the ant queen. He fumbled around until he found something solid that sloped downward that he could break through to get out of the queen’s body. However, unlike the wall-like side he had expected, there was an opening filled with gore and internal organs.
It was just wide enough for him to crawl through if he so wished.
Ackster had found one of the joints connecting the thorax either to the ant queen’s abdomen or to her head. He wasn’t sure whether to proceed or not. Crawling out of the ant queen’s ass didn’t sound very attractive. But he was tired and weak, almost too tired and weak to break through the ant queen’s sturdy exoskeleton.
The aftereffects of using his entire strength and Limit Breaker were beginning to set in.
He could stay inside the ant queen and rest. But Ackster wanted to get out of her cramped insides and finish what he had started. He was confident he would get back enough energy to survive by digesting the ant queen.
So, even if it wasn’t nice, it couldn’t be much worse than what he had already done, considering he had bathed in the ant queen’s insides. Ackster crawled through the hole, hoping it would lead to the mouth so he could leave the queen and clear up her throne room so that he could rest before trying to find his way out.
Ackster sighed in relief.
The space he entered on the other side was much too small to be the ant queen’s hill-like abdomen, which meant he had entered her head. He had to remain crawling, or he would bonk his head against the ant queen’s esophagus. Or what he assumed was her esophagus. He couldn’t see anything, and he wasn’t good at biology, especially not ant biology, even after dissecting a bunch of worker ants.
But, regardless of what it was, it wasn’t hard enough to stop him, so he stood up and space for himself by clearing out the ant queen’s head and using what was within to sate his hunger.
‘Yup, that’s gotta be brain.’
Ackster’s hand found a soft, juicy slab of meat that had a worryingly familiar consistency, which confirmed that he had entered the head and not some sort of antechamber for the abdomen.
With another sigh, Ackster began eating. This much wasn’t enough to daunt his Iron Stomach or Iron Will. He knew he had to eat, regardless of what it was. And even if ant brain wasn’t the most delectable delicacy, it was still pretty decent and far from the worst he had eaten. It was even pretty high up in the list of the things he had eaten during his stay in the ant nest. And since he couldn’t see anything, he didn’t need to be put off by the lacking visual aspects of the meal.
Ackster munched away at the ant queen’s brain as he tried to recover his energy so he could ensure his safety after finding his way out of the ant queen’s body. Now that the queen and the general were dead, there shouldn’t be much to worry about, even if he had lost an arm. But the fact that he had lost his arm in a fight that he felt he shouldn’t have lost his arm fighting told Ackster that it wouldn’t be so bad to be careful now and then. After all, his arm and shoulder weren’t far from his head. If the ant queen’s strike had gone a little to the side or if he had been unable to dodge, Ackster would have died.
‘Let’s just say it’s a good experience.’
Ackster did his best to ignore the still bleeding stump as he ate. At least it was beginning to close up and scab. He wouldn’t die from blood loss.
“Good work, Mio.”
Mio hadn’t done much in the fight, but the slime kept Ackster company, which deserved a compliment for such a good and cute slime. Mio patted Ackster’s forehead in response.
Comforted by the slime in his hair, Ackster took another bite. But halfway through, he bit something hard, and something in his mouth cracked.
“Was that my fucking tooth?”
Ackster spat out whatever it was he had bit on in his mouth. It came out covered in mush, a mix of minced brain, saliva, and blood. He was about to use his other hand to pilfer through the mess and pick out what he had eaten.
“Shit.”
He had done it out of habit, and it wasn’t until he realized nothing was happening, even as he thought he was moving his arm, that he remembered that his arm was gone. Ackster scowled at his hand.
With only one hand to use, Ackster couldn’t really rife through its contents.
He closed his fist carefully, squeezing away the soft stuff and finally closing on something hard. There was only one hard thing, so he shook his hand to rid it of brain matter so he could try and figure out what he had bitten. It was too smooth and cool to be a rock that had been inside the ant queen while it was alive.
The ant queen had just died, and a stone would have retained some of her warmth. But other than identifying some of its superficial properties, Ackster couldn’t do much since he was still sitting in pitch darkness.
“Here, hold this.”
He held up the not-stone-stone to Mio. Since he had only one hand and his bag was in his room, Ackster couldn’t carry it with him, at least not if he wanted to do something else at the same time.
“And don’t eat it.”
Ackster wasn’t sure Mio could digest it since it was even hard enough to chip his tooth, but Ackster wouldn’t put anything past the mysterious little slime.
Mio tapped Ackster’s head once in acknowledgment as it held onto the stone within its hair-filled body.
With that, Ackster finished his meal and found his way to the ant queen’s moth and left her body.
Things hadn’t panned out exactly as he planned it. But Ackster had defeated the ant general, the queen, and he had done it without dying in the process. He had lost his arm, so he couldn’t call it a perfect victory, but it was good enough. Now, it just remained to be seen how dire the situation outside the ant queen would be.