They were finally at the Fire Ant colony. Janet had expected to find a giant anthill, or maybe even multiple tiny anthills crawling with giant ants that spewed flame from their mouths. Instead, she and Darius were standing on the precipice of a cavernous canyon. She had almost forgot. Not only were Fire Ants a subterranean species, they excavated their habitat for rare minerals with which they fed their brood.
As for the adults, they supplemented their stores of energy with an omnivorous habit, with their diet consisting mostly of small rodents and birds, and the occasional herbage. Neither plants nor animals survived near Fire Ant pits for long, as evidenced by the bare, polished rocks that reminded Janet of depictions of desert monoliths and their sun-bleached, wind-scraped smoothness.
If Janet was to hazard a guess, the giant canyon littered with foot-wide tunnel openings on the sides had once been a flat plain, or perhaps even a heavily vegetated hill. They were in the depths of a gargantuan primeval jungle, after all. These ants consumed copious amounts of organic matter for energy, alongside steady helpings of soil, filtering it through their bodies to absorb the minerals that allowed them to grow so large. And there were millions of them. They had likely scraped off all life from the face of their colony grounds within the first months of habitation.
“Are we really going to get down there?” Janet asked. She was worried for her life and safety. At the bottom of the canyon, the area Darius had pointed out as the most likely place for the two to find the ant variant he was looking for, Janet could see a carpet of glittering red. The sun’s light hit the crystalline carapaces of the ants revealing the thousands of individuals milling down there. Giant ants the size of deer or antelope from mandibles to stinger.
In addition, the ant-made canyon was hundreds of meters deep. There was even a thundering waterfall along one of its sides, for goodness’ sake! How exactly did Darius expect…
Before Janet could raise her voice in protest, Darius cleared his throat loudly to gather her attention. He was standing atop a glowing platform likely conjured from a pane of light. “Get on. We don’t have all day.”
It was honestly anticlimactic and rather dull, their descent to the shadowy depths. Darius, with nary an ounce of exertion visible on his stalwart face, levitated himself and Janet into the air, past all the snapping mandibles of hungry-looking giant ants, and gently lowered both of them towards his destination.
Janet had expected a perilous fight filled with hemolymph and gore and the consequent thousands of healed wounds and consumed ant souls. She was glad to have been wrong. Instead of what would have surely been a painful, grueling experience, the trip down exposed the sheltered bumkin in her to spectacular views of caverns larger than the largest homes in Lakewood, glowing crystals that lit the passageways into those caverns, and ants. Thousands upon thousands of ants.
At the top, the ants had been tiny. Well, tiny as compared to the giants that were busy tunneling into rock as the pair descended to the depths. As they dropped and the air became damper and cooler, and as the heat of the sun dissipated into the upper layers of rock, the first instances of fire magic use were revealed. Instead of excavated rock, Janet laid eyes to melted patches of bedrock.
The ants who did the melting were almost a meter across at the head, and in their wake dozens of smaller ants carried away the sludge towards the dimly lit tunnels. Industry was at work here. And for the first time in a relatively short period of time, Janet felt herself become smaller and smaller as she saw the scale of operation at work in front of her.
“We’re looking for a cluster of ants as large as these,” Darius pointed out as they came across an ant larger than the former giants by about two times. The head on which its giant mandibles attached was a mess of ridges and crystal protrusions, and was about two and a half meters end to end widthwise. Janet did not get to lay sight to its length, but she suspected the beast to be in excess of eight meters long.
“The clusters are usually made up of about ten individuals, led by a leader that can use rudimentary fire spells outside of its body. You’ll be hunting such a leader,” Darius finished.
“I’ll be hunting the leader?” Janet asked, gobsmacked by Darius’ declaration. The giant ant she had seen was already capable of biting her into halves with barely any effort at all. How, then, did he expect her to fare when faced by their leader?
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of the brutes. All you’ll have to deal with is the magic user. They’re usually reared from a different variant fed only from mana-rich minerals, which means that although they are very magically potent, they’re veritable glass cannons when confronted with physical force.”
That did make Janet feel a little better. She had even begun to plan her battle plan when Darius announced their arrival at the canyon’s foot in his resting monotone. A moment later, Janet was jarred back to wakefulness and alertness as the platform under her feet dissipated into glittering motes of colorful mana that dispersed into thin air, depositing Janet quite roughly onto the hard canyon floor.
She did not have time to process her surroundings. While she could hear a softly babbling brook somewhere towards her back, alongside the tell-tale spray of a not-so-distant waterfall, all her ears and eyes could perceive was the sea of red carapaces that made a synchronous clacking on the rocky ground as thousands of giant ants headed directly towards Darius and herself. It was like the beginning of a nightmare, and the assailant was a horde of insects keen on turning her into nutritious biomass.
“What do we do?” she asked. Her voice came out high-pitched and laced with the utter panic she was experiencing, only for her breath to catch as Darius waved his hand as if in greeting. The resulting effect was remarkably more attention-grabbing. A beam of brilliant light shot out from thin air at the point where his arm’s arc had originated. In short order, countless more sprouted along the path he had traced with his palm, all pointing towards the approaching horde.
Then, the hissing began. A stampede of clanking appendages began as the Fire Ants beat a hasty retreat. The ones unlucky enough to be hit by the searing beams were all cooking within their shells, releasing clouds of steam as they breathed their last. The unintended effect of the steam escaping was a sound akin to the screeching of a boiling kettle. All the sounds, the synchronized screeching and the panicked clacking of hard appendages on even harder rock joined together into what Janet could only describe as an ominous dirge heralding death’s descent. It chilled her to her core.
“Light can do that? How?” she shouted towards Darius over the loud noise of dead and soon-to-be-dying ants.
“The light isn’t really killing them. Look closer,” Darius instructed his student. Janet peered past the cacophony of red bodies and the clouds of steam, till her eyes rested upon one of Darius’ beams. It only glanced across the ant’s abdomen before it proceeded to assail another body. The ant appeared unharmed. It was only about five seconds later that the thrashing and escaping steam began, causing Janet to nearly retch as she realized the insect had been cooked within its protective covering.
“How…” she managed to utter out, but was unable to finish her statement as a breeze blew the scent of cooking insect right into her nostrils, blowing away all the control she held over her guts. The raw-smelling scent of half-cooked meat seared into her scent receptors, throwing her gut into a regurgitative fit.
When she was done clearing her breakfast away, Darius supported her as she attempted to stand up and offered her a spare waterskin he often used when cleaning up his kills. A spray of cold water onto her face, and the clearing of her breakfast’s putrid taste off her tongue, allowed her to regain some sense of composure. By then, all the ants had retreated into tunnels. All but one, the largest of them all.
“The light doesn’t kill them,” Darius began his explanation. “It does however catalyze a reaction within their blood that drives their body temperature out of control. The adverse reaction to light is also the reason why these particular species of ant abhor the sun as much as they do.”
Janet noted the morsel of information at the back of her head where she kept vital information like how many fruits still remained in her hoard – her storage for future-proofing against hunger – and things like potential methods of death delivery that could potentially unalive her permanently. Along with a casual strike from Gaia and a concerted effort from Darius, now she had to add light to the list. Or at least some versions of it. The light crystals she had seen illuminating the caverns did not appear to harm the ants.
“The larger Fire Ants,” Darius continued, “Have a larger, more protective carapace that can reflect the light, keeping them safe from its debilitating effects. While it impedes them by hindering their sight, it cannot kill them. they are the kind we came here to kill.”
Before Janet could gather a response for the ominous declaration, Darius had her flying high above the approaching cavalry of heavily armored, heavily lethal and definitely pissed-off ants. There were fewer of them, so Janet felt she and Darius would be safer in the air.
That was, of course, until the first flaming bolt of fire arrived, followed closely by two more from both the left and the right. Hidden among their gargantuan protectors, were smaller ants. They were smaller than the smallest individuals Janet had seen at the top of the canyon, yet they radiated a heat detectable from a distance by her mana senses.
By what she could tell, these smaller ants seemed to be the magic wielders that Darius had spoken of. Blast after blast of flame was escaped narrowly, but it became clear that the flaming bolts were driving the flying pair towards a central point. The clusters of ants were slowly gaining on their position, and the bolts kept them from retreating higher or farther to the side. They were being slowly herded by a bunch of ants.
Large, scary ants with mandibles sized twice Janet’s height, but still.
Janet still did not descend into panic. Darius had dealt with thousands of the insects easily, and the scant hundreds trying to make a meal out of them would face the same fate. Not even when Darius began descending them towards the ground did Janet fear the insects.
That was until a moment before their feet landed on what should have been solid rock and a geyser of lava erupted from beneath them. Janet reacted reflexively, deploying a pane of shadow to deflect the spouting white-hot molten stone, but her effort was undone with the ease of a bull breaking through a wall made of fragile, brittle vines.
Before she could blink, the shadow that had kept all harm at bay was pierced through. Her foot almost got submerged in the tiny volcanic eruption, but Darius’ quick work prevented that from happening. Their descent had turned into a hasty rise back into the skies. His speed did save her from losing a limb, but it did not prevent all harm. As they rose higher, Janet felt a piercing pain through her ankle. A droplet of white-hot lava had pierced all the way across her foot, piercing through the bone in an even, cauterized hole.
“So, they sent a Lava Spewer to hamper our efforts,” Darius muttered as his eyes combed the ground to pinpoint the foe that had forced him into retreat. “Janet, how do you feel about consuming an evolved caster Fire Ant soul for your first primal element?”
At first, Janet was jarred by the lack of pain in her foot. Her nerves and everything in between the entry and exit wounds had been severed so cleanly and destroyed so utterly that no sensation at all, not even pain or heat, could be felt. Even as her foot began reconstituting itself with the help of some of the souls that felled ants had dropped all over the place, Janet was still reeling at the power that simple cast of a simple lava spell had held.
If she could wield such power… some cultists in their caverns of rock would be in for a surprise.
“Let’s do this,” she gave her reply to Darius’ question. She had not internalized his words, but the way his attention was locked onto one of the smaller ants said it all. This particular ant commanded a larger contingent of giant ants, and itself, while the same size as the other caster ants, glowed with an inner fire that radiated mana at more than five times the luminosity of the other variants of its kind.
They had picked a target to hunt. Now, the time of action had come.
Before proceeding with whatever plan Darius would invariably come up with, Janet decided to top herself up with mana. A quick application of intent had her mana pool exerting a suction towards the outer ends of the mana network, while she kept her pores, all of them, open. In less than a minute, her anemic pool was back to full capacity.
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While Janet went and pulled her dagger free from its sheath, Darius was busy observing the converging ants with a disturbing keenness. His eyes tracked their movements even as he effortlessly maneuvered himself and Janet out of harm’s way. Calculations of mana volumes, lethality of cast spells, strength of the giant guards… all these and more variables filtered through his mind as a battle plan slowly came to mind. While Janet would be in charge of killing the Lava Spewer, he would be in charge of dispatching the other two-hundred-some elite ant beasts.
The man could have decided to keep his hands clean and transport away the single ant they needed dead, leaving the others to perpetuate the colony’s dominance in the area. He however, was feeling antsy from all the babysitting he had been doing the past few months. He had accomplished some remarkable feats of magic, and even had raised more questions about that expansive field than he had in decades, but his role in life was Slayer first, scholar second.
“Here’s the plan,” he began, then went on to outline his observations and their implications on the actions the pair needed to take next.
“Are you sure…” Janet sought clarification, but it was not time for questions.
“Just do your part. I’ll make sure mine goes flawlessly.”
All she had to do was simple: kill the Lava Spewer so Darius could land safely on the ground and deal with the rest of the ants. One thing that Darius had been asking quite a lot about was her ability to dispense death from a distance. While he gave great focus on her body’s strength, her range of motion, and even the applications of her shadow [Talent], it was her ability to kill by assaulting the target’s soul that piqued his interest the most. And he wanted a demonstration.
As Janet had done on most instances that she had needed to engage her first talent, she went to bite off her finger. Darius put a stop to that with a stern gesture.
“Most beasts can sense the scent of blood,” he said. “And any spilled drop of blood you leave lying around can leave you vulnerable to tracking via blood magic. Or did you forget you have a cult that revels in sacrifice on your trail?”
That was a very good point. Janet knew he was right, but all her activations of that [Talent] had involved injury of some sort. He was asking her to come up with a new technique right in the middle of combat? Even as that thought crossed her mind, a ball of fire exploded somewhere to her left. Darius weaved the two of them past two smaller balls of flame… and drove them right into the path of a hotter, larger, and blue-colored fireball that had come directly from the Lava Spewer.
Darius had to allow them to drop slightly and let the ball sail overhead, but its explosion nonetheless released enough heat that Janet felt the temperature in the canyon rise to near-unbearable levels. Slowly but surely, the ants were pushing them downwards, and their attacks were becoming harder and harder to evade.
Looking downwards, Janet saw the twenty clusters or so of ants had almost gotten themselves into some sort of formation. At the middle was the Lava Spewer’s larger cluster of almost twenty individuals, and on all sides were the caster ants’ clusters, making some sort of circle.
Then, a ring of fireballs rose into the sky. They expanded as they climbed higher, joining each other into an impregnable ring of flames. At first Janet did not think much of it… then the Lava Spewer let loose with an even faster fireball that would surely engulf them both.
By all accounts, they were screwed. Trying to escape to the side would get them into the path of the combined fireball ring, and climbing higher would only delay the inevitable collision with the Lava Spewer’s hotter and deadlier attack.
“See? I told you I need that little critter dead,” Darius reiterated. As he spoke, he levitated them sideways at a blinding pace, allowing them to escape the ring by a hair’s breadth.
“Brace yourself.”
“Huh?”
The resulting explosion thundered across the canyon, releasing hellish amounts of heat and knocking loose some rocks that began making their way down the canyon walls. It might have been naivete that led Janet to hope, just for an instant, that the worst was over… then, her hope was washed away when another ring of fireballs was released, then another, then another.
There were three, and this time around, they combined into a veritable wall. A cylindrical wall of fire that would trap Darius and herself inside the ungodly heat, awaiting the ascending death of a blue fireball.
“You need to do something,” Darius cautioned, “And quick.”
“But…” she began, only for Darius to deliver his coldest observation yet.
“They’re starving us of air. The explosions heat up the air above preventing more from descending our way, while every activation of a fireball down here uses copious amounts of oxygen. We might escape the flames, but we’ll suffocate before the hour is out.”
The ants had evolved for the oxygen-starved depths. She and Darius, not so much. It was as good a reason as any to find a way to kill her mark. She needed to attack the spewer’s soul, and she needed control of her soul to do that. The only way that came to mind was meditation. She silently entrusted her physical form to Darius’ capable hands and closed her eyes.
Less than five minutes later, intense heat on her skin and the subsequent ragdoll effect on her body told her that the second attack had detonated. She cared none for all that though. Her entire focus, however difficult it was to maintain, was centered on the pitch-black part of her soul that had a less dark rune of shadow attached to it and a tiny patch of shadow floating beside it. She let her awareness descend into the sphere-shaped part with a gaping maw on one side.
The world on the other end, if it could be called that, was alight with flaming souls. A number of them were slowly dissipating into the surrounding sea of energy, while the most robust among them were arrayed into a circular aggregation. Amongst the hundreds of flame-colored souls, some twenty-some possessed brighter, more luminescent bands of flame around them. Her target glowed brightest, and was right in the middle of the milling reddish balls with two solid bands of vermilion around it.
It was odd that she could not detect Darius’ soul anywhere, but her goal was to consume the Lava Spewer whole, not spy upon the state of her teacher’s innermost being. It would have been nice to decipher exactly what his talents were, seeing as he was adept at light, levitation, had even summoned a goddess – and Gaia only knew what kind of magic was involved in that, and he was an accomplished healer. He had, after all, cleared out her former set of vestigial mana channels…
It was fine. She’d find out eventually.
For now, though, she allowed herself to cross the distance into the midst of the ant souls. If she had the time, or the know-how, she would have loved to keep for herself these healthy, strong-looking souls as insurance for the next time she was injured or needed a pick-me-up, but that was unfortunately not something she could do.
Yet.
Her target in her sights, she weaved and bobbed her way around the ant souls, one and all by far larger than hers, and settled next to the largest. She was certain the spewer was casting magic, since one of the bands around its soul momentarily changed from a bright, luminous red to a light blue that somehow glowed even brighter. It was time.
Janet, even after all her years of doing this, did not know how it happened, or even how her target reacted when the process began. All she knew was that just like with the dreaded Marius, she needed to consume the Lava Spewer utterly and completely.
With a small amount of dread and an even larger upwell of anticipation, she willed her maw, the part she knew took bites off of other souls, to pierce the surface of the fiery soul.
At first, there was resistance. The soul even evaded her maw on her second attempt, but that all changed when the bands all returned to a flaming red. She did not know whether what pierced the balloon-like soul body were teeth, but they did their job perfectly. A hole had been torn, allowing Janet access to the soul’s substance of goodness and power.
Not wasting any time, she willed the maw that seemed to terminate nowhere, appearing like an endless abyss into the depths of her being to keep itself attached at the perforation she had made. The soul had already begun to gush out soul matter. With the zeal of a parched beast at a watering hole, she drank deep. The best thing was that the soul itself was expelling matter, so she did not need to produce suction. She did not even know whether such a thing was possible.
In Janet’s perspective, minutes went by. It was hard to tell time in the soul realm, and the feelings of untold ecstasy resulting from the soul matter sliding smoothly into the gullet of her soul did not help much. As the euphoria of the devouring threatened to overwhelm her senses, she tried to find a distraction. For the first time, Janet deigned to look around. The soul she was currently slurping up was bigger than herself by degrees of magnitude, so it would take some time to be completely swallowed.
On the ‘sky’ was the gigantic rune still looming large and undisturbed. Looking closer, she could even see an outline of that little patch of shadow that had until now rebuffed all her attempts at mastering shadow’s second concept, not that she even fully understood the first.
She quickly got bored of looking at the sky and turned her sight towards the souls around the one she was currently gobbling up. Somehow, twenty-odd souls had grouped around the gradually diminishing larger one. They seemed to be piling atop one another. It was likely that on the outside world, the Lava Spewer’s guards had formed a protective ball around their dying leader.
All around her though, the larger, brighter souls of the caster ants flared up synchronously, their bands flaring up with intense luminosity. It might have been time shenanigans in the realm of souls messing with her perception, but it seemed as though they were casting even more rapidly. Darius was certain to be under heavy fire.
Then, something odd began to happen. The ball of souls surrounding the one she was eating began to descend. How did she know their depth was increasing? The orientation of the souls of the clusters around her began to change. At first, the depth had been easily explained away by the guardian ants forming a protective pile around their leader. As time went by, though, Janet’s vantage of the other ants grew steeper by the minute. The damn ants were tunneling away, and she was not close to halfway done gobbling up the spewer!
She either needed to escape, or she needed to finish up the eating a little faster. While she was aware distance was relative and completely conceptual in the soul realm, her devouring [Talent] still had limitations of distance in the real world. She did not want to see what happened when her soul was separated too far from her body, so she began planning out her next steps.
The only solution? Devour faster. But the soul was still larger than her soul body. Her first thought had been to engulf it like a feeding starfish, but that option was unfeasible. The second idea seemed a lot more promising. Despite all logic pointing in the other direction, she needed to somehow suck out the soul matter. All she had been doing up until this point had been to allow the soul to gush its substance into her maw. Now, she needed to actively pull more soul matter in.
Like she did with mana, the first step was to create a negative pressure around wherever the soul matter ended up. She didn’t have time to investigate that now though, since she could feel her soul being tugged back into her body.
There! The tug. She didn’t need the spewer to remain close, just its soul. With her entire mind on the task, she bit even deeper into the soul, ensuring she had an unshakeable holdfast, then pulled towards her body. Even in the soul realm, she could still feel its general direction.
At first, nothing seemed to happen. Her soul was being stretched by the weakening soul and its guardians deeper into the ground, while her body was tugging on her, trying to pull her back. She was being stretched like a spring, and eventually something had to give.
She hoped the ant’s soul would give way first.
It happened almost instantaneously. First, euphoria had turned into uncomfortable pulling in two directions. Janet had been worried that her soul would snap… then she was back inside her body, awake and well. For some reason, her mana was almost all gone.
“What happened?” she posed to Darius. The man was holding her to his waist like a sack of vegetables, while his other hand rained piercing lances of light upon the ants. Most of their number were dead. “How long was I out?”
“It’s been almost an hour,” Darius replied.
An hour? Janet could not believe it. Then, she noticed that Darius was standing on the ground. She quickly dislodged herself from his waist and stood upright. Taking a gander around the battlefield, only three casters remained, along with about ten giant ants. And they all appeared to be on their last legs.
The rest of the bodies all had huge holes poked into their sides, and their bodies, just like those of the weaker ants before them, were steaming. It seemed as if once the armor was pierced, their blood reacted to the light in the same way as their weaker brethren.
With a sickening crunch, a lance of light marked the end of the last caster ant. An explosion of light as the lance’s structure lost cohesion began the steaming phase of the ant’s death. This time, the stench was more bearable.
That ant had been the last. With a final flourish of his arms, all the still descending lances exploded in the air. It might have been to warn away any ants with a mind to join in on the battle, or Maybe Darius was feeling showy. Regardless, he had completed his part of the plan. The question remained whether Janet had accomplished hers.
“So, how did the [Talent] acquisition go?” Darius asked. “You were meditating, then suddenly you went limp as the spewer and its ranks began tunneling into the ground.”
“So, that’s what happened.” Janet mused. She then tried to feel for whatever had happened in her soul. She couldn’t remember much, but she had felt something snap during the soul realm tug-of-war. Since she was evidently alive…
Janet crossed her legs and went into meditation once more. Her descent into the introspective was a bit tumultuous with errant thoughts of snapping ant mandibles assailing her peace of mind. They were all dead, though. She once more found herself staring at her soul.
The shadowy bits were still shadowy, the rune was still stoically attached to the darker sphere… her maw was closed. For the first time ever, the maw on her soul was closed. Her soul, just like any other, had taken a spherical shape.
Janet hurried to dip her awareness into her soul body. There did not seem to be any problems with that. She entered into the soul expecting to be ushered into the realm of souls by abundant energy and the slowly disassociating souls of the recently dead ants.
Her eyes, if her sight while in the soul realm could even be called that, were met with the strangest sight. Instead of the ‘outside world’ of the soul realm, her awareness this time around entered a smaller confine.
The shadow rune was still writ large across the sky, but the energy was less abundant. This was not the realm of souls. There weren’t other souls present other than the soul she had been devouring, and even that one was slowly dissipating. The hole on its side was leaking soul matter into the far smaller world.
Somehow, during the struggle, Janet had managed to dislodge the ant’s soul, which was now being slowly processed and digested. It remained to be seen how fast the process would go, or even whether her talent could activate while her soul-devouring maw was off-duty, but all in all, everything seemed to be in order.
“Everything went well,” she reported to Darius once she resurfaced from her meditating.
“Good. I was worried.”
She wanted to ask him why his soul had been nowhere to be seen in the realm she knew all souls to reside in, but she feared he’d think she was trying to eat him. She purposed to ask him once they had established a bit more trust between them, but until then she’d add the absence up to her list of Darius’ mysteries.
A single question did arise in the whole debacle that needed an answer, for she felt it was the key to her advancing her soul talent. Did everyone enclose a miniature soul realm within their soul bodies, and what the heck had happened to her mana?