Given how easily the group seemed to be mowing down the Ants, however, Alpha still wasn't confident enough to take them on with his main body. He'd made a lot of progress over the last few weeks, but these obviously weren't just some mindless beast he could mow down. Besides that, he would have to enter the nest himself, and that meant fighting not only the intruders but the angry Ant Colony as well. Luckily, Alpha had prepared for this eventuality, and with the help of some Worker Dummies, had booby-trapped a good portion of the tunnels since his discovery.
Now it was just a matter of luring the group into the traps. The question was, how?
The biggest issue was that he didn't know WHY they were here in the first place. As far as he could tell, there were no settlements or the like for several hundred kilometers in any direction, so he doubted that the group had simply stumbled upon the nest. They were too well equipped and too well organized. Even if they had just stumbled on the nest, why attack it? The Ants were obviously dangerous, so why take the risk of entering the heart of their nest? Suppose it was just a matter of food or materials. In that case, they could easily pick off the numerous hunting parties around the valley.
The group seemed to use a language similar to the one the human's who'd attacked him in the Grassy Sea. His Lexicon of the local language still wasn't developed enough to understand what was being said, but at the very least, it told him he hadn't been teleported to the other side of the world. The AI was starting to regret not picking up the language from Jīshí; playing back his discussions with her returned only a strange rumbling sound, like stones falling down a cliffside.
The simplest method would probably be to herd them down the tunnels using the Ants. Alpha had long decrypted the simple pheromone messaging system used by the ants, and each Dummy was equipped with a synthesizer and receptor to better integrate with the colony. Another option was to kidnap one of the group and either split them up or lure them into the tunnels. But who to take? The seeming support and ranged units near the back seemed to be the best bet. All he would need to do would be to use the nanobots from a couple of Dummy Ants to create a small capture unit. It was something he was quite familiar with from previous expeditions.
Natives tended to be a lot more cooperative when their political and social leaders started to disappear one by one.
Now it was just a matter of figuring out which method to use...
¿Por qué no los dos?
Chuckling to himself, the AI began to move his Dummies into place.
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The heavily armored wolfman once more swung his large great-sword into the unending way of ants. Several large Soldiers were cut in two, only to be replaced by several more. An explosion would sound every so often, as someone accidentally hit one of the Bombers mixed within the throng. His frustration building, the man screamed back towards one of the Archers in the back.
[Armored Wolfman] - "You Bastard Vlad! I thought you said this was a new Nest?! What new Nest had multiple Juvenile Queens and this many Soldiers?"
As the Archer yelled back, his hands never stopped moving as they plucked arrows from seemingly thin air and sent them screaming into the hoard.
[Vlad] - "Screw you, Marcus! I only said I saw a few hunting parties! I told you before we needed to scout more, but noooo, you insisted we be gung ho and wipe them out before a King spawned."
Bomber Ants were an invasive species introduced by the Mages to the Skybreaker continent a few centuries ago. They were usually found in the Vast Desert of the uncharted Southern Continent, where the mountain-sized predatory Tortoises and Sandworms kept their population in check. Out here, though, they had no natural predators, and colonies could quickly grow to monstrous proportions.
If left unchecked, a single colony can easily strip all life from a region in a matter of years. Worse yet, if conditions were optimal, there was the chance of a "King" being born. A King was a Solider Ant, easily 10 times the size of a normal Solider, and far more powerful, nearing {Soul Fusion} from the moment it matured and rapidly growing in strength from there.
To make matters worse, a King drastically increased a Colony's aggressive nature, resulting in an explosive growth rate. If a King happened to spawn, they would have to send a request to the Awakened Beast Clan, and their small City-State wouldn't be able to pay for that kind of expense.
They'd managed to remain independent from the Clan and their war against the Hedge Mages so far through their own power and skills, but this was just the kind of thing that the Clan would use to finally pressure them into joining their ranks. From there, they would be lucky if their Soldiers didn't end up as spell fodder on the front-lines.
When scouts had returned with reports of Ant Hunting parties near the swamplands to the north, The City Council had issued an emergency request to track the next down. While the Adventurer's Guild might not have had the resources or influence as some of the more powerful and older Sects and Clans, it more than made up for it in numbers. In less than a week, hundreds of Cultivators from around the area had gathered to track down the Ant Colony.
The swamplands were massive, however, and even with their numbers, it was slow goings. It had only been thanks to Vlad's skills that they managed to track down a hunting party and follow them into the tunnels. The Colony's defenses had been fiercer than they had been anticipating, though. How such a large Nest had gone undetected for so long, they had no idea. The assault group had already lost close to 45% of their numbers just getting to the Queen's chambers, only to find it was just a secondary chamber built to house new queens.
A quick surprise attack from Marcus had managed to kill one of the Juvenile Queens, but the other had managed to escape in the ensuing chaos. Now they were debating whether or not to keep pressing forward or to retreat. They didn't need to wipe out the whole Nest; as long as they killed the Queens and any Royal eggs, the Colony would quickly collapse. At the same time, they were wholly unprepared to deal with a nest this size. There was no guarantee they could even make it to the main Queen's chamber, let alone deal with the royal guard.
They might be better off just retreating and returning better equipped.
[Marcus] - "SATORI! GIVE THE ORDER FOR RETREAT! WE NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE!.... SATORI!?"
Marcus turned from the fray to see Satori, their main healer and strategist, as they were engulfed from the waste up by a strange, silvery slime. Marcus's eyes followed the slime up to see it attached to the abdomen of an abnormally large Worker. Seeming to the scene it was spotted, the strange slime Ant jerked up, pulling Satori off the ground and fully enveloping the struggling healer, before making a dash down the tunnel behind them.
The heavy warrior quickly broke out of their dazed surprise and bellowed,
[Marcus] - "WE'VE BEEN FLANKED! THEY'VE GOT SATORI! Groups B and C, maintain formation and retreat! Group A, retrieve Satori and meet us back at the nest entrance."
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A third of the group turned around and dashed after the strange ant who had kidnapped their healer. In the back of his mind, something didn't sit well with Marcus; he'd never heard of an Ant like this in a Bomber Colony. Could it be some kind of mutation? Was this the precursor to a King? What struck the wolfman as even stranger was the fact that Satori had been targeted. Not only had the ants picked out the most important individual of the group, but they then had the presence of mind to stealthily abduct the man from right under their noses.
What was their goal? If they simply wanted to take out a high-value target, why not simply kill him before anyone noticed? Why take off with him? As the groups made their way closer and closer to exit, the gears in Marcus's head began to turn. Suddenly, the tunnels shook as a tremendous explosion rocked the Nest from further in.
In the back of his mind, Marcus felt 4 of the 5 Soul Flames of the group who'd gone after Satori snuff out in an instant. The fifth flickered wildly before it too was extinguished. Marcus's eyes went wide as he turned to the group.
[Marcus] - "It's a Trap! Activate the esc-"
And then the dark tunnels turned white.
When Marcus next awoke, it was in a triage tent, surrounded by the sound of the wounded and dying. The wolfman breathed out a sigh of relief; it seemed that someone had managed to activate their emergency escape beacon at the last second. Or at least someone who'd survived the initial blast had.
The next few hours were filled with alternating between the healers' visits and what remained of the command staff. It seemed the expedition had met with a huge disaster. Of the roughly 400 Adventurers, split into 12 groups who'd entered the Nest, only 41 had left. His own group had started with 32 members, but by the time of their retreat, only 15 had remained. And of those, only 8 managed to survive the final explosion.
What the hell was going on? The losses prior to that last moment were heavy, though that could be attributed to Command underestimating the Colony's strength. But only a 10% survival rate? That was insane. According to the reports, the other groups had called a retreat at roughly the same time as he's had, and each had been ambushed by some kind of massive explosion during their final push.
What had happened? Bomber ants might have been more intelligent than some other insect type spirit beast, but they had never witnessed a coordinated trap on this scale before. What changed? Several groups had even been totally wiped out, not even having enough time to activate their escape beacons. However, of those that survived, each reported a strange, new type of ant that had snuck up behind the group and kidnapped one of their members before retreating.
Command theorized that the new ants were some kind of mutation, or at worse, signs that a King had already been born. Those groups that had been totally wiped out were thought to have followed after the new ants and taken the traps' brunt. Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact remains that they were far over their heads in this matter. News had supposedly already reached the City Council, and they were preparing to contact the Awakened Beast Clan.
Frustrated both as his failure as a Leader and at their need to ask for outside help, Marcus struggled to speed up his recovery and meet with the team leaders. Something didn't sit well with him; could this all just be explained away by a mutation? How had the ant's remained hidden all this time? How had they tricked experienced Adventurers, well versed in all manners of spiritual and magical traps through their many delves into ancient ruins? This whole thing stunk of a third party. The question was, who? And Why?
After meeting with the surviving team leaders started to shed some light on the matter. Their first theory had been the Hedge Mages; they were the ones to bring the Ants to the continent initially, but that theory was quickly discarded. They were perfectly content in leaving the Ants to do their thing and had yet to take an active role in their spread. One of the team leaders had suggested it may have been the Awakened Beast Clan themselves. A quickly growing Bomber Ant Colony was the perfect excuse for the swoop in and "save the day."
This theory held more credibility; the Clan had used similar tactics to absorb some of the smaller City-States and clans in the past. But the modus operandi didn't match. More so with the threat that a Colony like this could pose if things got out of hand, even for a group as powerful as the Clan. Sure, their City-State was one of few holdouts left in the area, but why take the risk for so little gain?
That's when a new piece of information came to light that not only shocked the team leaders but threw all of their theories into disarray.
Four of the captured Adventures (and a few random survivors from other groups) were still alive...
Baron Levi Ashdale.
A Flying Disk User by the name of Whippoorwill,
A Dragonkin named Ti'so.
.... and Satori.
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Well, this had been a productive day.
Other than one group who'd somehow sensed his Capture Ant approaching and destroyed it, the other groups had been taken by total surprise. Mostly thanks to both Alpha using his map of the Nest to flank them from behind and the nanobot's camouflaging ability. The AI had carefully observed each group and chosen a target, either of which played some kind of significant support roles with their weird abilities or seemed to be in some sort of Leadership position.
As predicted, part of the groups (and sometimes, entire groups) had broken off in pursuit. From there, it was just a matter of leading them to some of the more... enthusiastic traps he had set. As for those that remained, the sudden drop in manpower had forced them into retreat, which he took advantage of to herd them towards more traps.
Most were in the form of Nitropot Bombs, buried into the walls at critical intersections and set to detonate with a command from him or the Dummy Ant AIs. A few others were simple tunnel collapsing traps. As expected, those had been the least effective. However, what surprised him the most was the sudden spatial fluctuations and disappearance of several groups of wounded.
Teleportation wasn't a foreign thing to the Federation; in fact, the Interstellar Warp-gates worked on a similar principle. But the Infrastructure requirement and material cost meant that such things could only be found in the oldest and most well established of Systems. Granted, the fluctuations were weak, meaning they couldn't have moved far, probably less than a few kilometers. But the fact that such an apparently low-tech civilization had access to that kind of technology made Alpha stop and ponder.
Even still, of the roughly 400 foreign life signatures he'd managed to mark, 87% had been eliminated.
Alpha hadn't been totally ruthless, however. While they had been trespassing, He wasn't detached enough to know they didn't know that. He wasn't about to let them slaughter his only source of Bug Juice, but that didn't mean he had to kill everyone in cold blood either. That being said, 13 intruders had somehow survived, with various levels of injury, but somehow passed over by whatever method the others had used to escape.
This included 4 of the intruders whom Alpha had "kidnapped" that struck his interest. One was obviously someone of importance and influence if his equipment was anything to go by. He could be wrong, but that type was always good to have as extra leverage for any future negotiation. Another used spiritual energy to control a dozen flying disk-like weapons. If he could somehow work out how they had done it, he could see many potential uses. The third had surprised the AI the most; instead of the bipedal wolves that made up most intruders, this one had appeared remarkably similar to a Vidaasi, like the General, though half the size. This had been the most challenging capture, as the powerful front-line warrior had nearly destroyed his Capture Ant before Alpha managed to tranquilize it.
Using the Ant's pheromone synthesizer to mix up a Vidaasi-rated Tranq on the fly hadn't been easy, but then again, if you had the processing power available to the AI, you might as well use it. Humans were one thing, but if the Vidassi were on this planet, it was a strong indicator of a previous Federation presence. The problem was, there were no records of anything like this world, or Spiritual power, anywhere in his Database. Unless there was something so heavily classified that even HE didn't have access (unlikely).
The last had used some kind of unknown power, different from the spiritual energy most were using, to accelerate their companion's wounds at a rate visible to the naked eye. Like teleportation, it wasn't something unseen with Federation Tech, but it usually needed stationary equipment and advanced medical facilities. While unlocking the secrets now how he did so wouldn't be immediately useful to the AI, they would definitionally buy him some browny points from the bigwigs back home.
Unfortunately, four of the more heavily injured had expired by the time his Capture Ants had managed to dig them out of the rubble, leaving only 9 to be transported, sedated and undercover of course, back to the main base.
But of course, the most important thing he had gathered was walking through the base entrance just that moment.
Several Capture Ants walked through the bay entrance, their abdomens bulging several times their own size. As they approached the designated drop-off point, their stomachs opened up, spilling out their sweet, sweet Loot; the salvaged gear and supplies of the many intruders.
Alpha rubbed his metaphorical hands and crackled.
Where to begin?