~~~Daryl~~~

Why won't he wake up!? Daryl demanded. Tell him to answer me!

"Cheesesteak says he's okay," Princess replied. "He says he's just tired."

Bullshit! Daryl cursed, then shivered and tried not to look at Stanley as he turned away to force people awake.

He couldn't heal them otherwise. They needed to see what he was doing. They needed to believe he could heal them.

Cheesesteak wasn't talking. He wouldn't say why Adrian looked like death. Daryl had a terrible feeling why, and it became all too clear when he woke up Herman. The man immediately started screaming and clutching his neck. "Oh god! My head! They cut off my head! Oh, god, I..."

Daryl slapped him across the face. "Snap out of it! You're alive!"

He wanted to tell the man it hadn't happened. To tell him that it was all a dream or illusion, but he feared it wasn't. Damn you, Adrian! Why!? Why would you do that for him? Why would you risk your life for some worthless nobody!? I need you more... I need you to live...

Herman stared wide-eyed up at him in shock, but it was good enough for his purposes. The man saw him pull fake fire from the curtain that looked like it came from Cheesesteak. Herman saw him press those same flames against the stump of his missing arm... and the limb started regrowing.

The sight sent his gaze back to Adrian, and the missing arm there. Then to Princess and her stump of a foreleg. He couldn't heal either of them. They knew his secret.

Then his gaze tracked over to Stanley, hovering in the tunnel with his eyes closed. He hadn't ever tried to heal him, and he didn't need to. Stanley was fine. Aside from that screaming soul grating against all of their nerves... though it actually felt a little quieter today.

He really didn't want to think about those last few tunnels he'd followed Caffeine through to get here. But he doubted he'd ever be able to forget that... that... wind.

There had been no actual wind, but it had felt like he was pushing through hurricane-force winds with each step—winds of death.

Even now, he felt the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. What the fuck are you!?

"He saved Adrian." Princess lacked her usual venom toward Caffeine and his... whatever the fuck Stanley was.

I know that!

"Caffeine helped me protect you. Even if he is an idiot..."

He’d seen it. Those damn blades coming through the walls without warning and Caffeine eating them... I fucking know that!

"Grrr," Princess growled directly into his mind without making an actual sound. He still didn't understand how she did that... "You are being a big baby!"

I am not being a...

"Baby!"

You...

Princess bumped into his hip and almost knocked him over before he could send any more mean thoughts to her. "Adrian is okay. We will take him home and keep him inside until he recovers. Okay? Please don't be sad. We are okay now... and I'm scared too..."

Daryl freed one hand from the real fake magic healing and placed it on Princess's head. I'm sorry. I love you.

"Of course you do! I'm a perfect princess."

Yes, you are. Daryl didn't roll his eyes. He still wasn't sure if her personality resulted from their time together pre-system when he'd said those same words to her repeatedly or if she'd always been like this. He didn't care. She was perfect.

Herman's arm finished growing out into a hand and five fingers. Even the hair on his arm came back. So Daryl turned to the next person...

~~~Stanley~~~

Everything was nice and peaceful while meditating. The energy flowing through his body and brain brought a soothing feeling that noticeably diminished the ache inside his skull. Even the new ant souls popping up far below didn't bother him. It was just more cores for him once he got around to killing them.

While he was in there, Stanley looked over the soul wound for any damage beyond what the notification had said. It looked the same.

Then he put more effort into the meditation, trying to ramp it up... assuming that was a thing. Ideally, he wanted to knock the debuff out faster than before, and given that he hadn't meditated his way out of a debuff since before the E-grade evolution, he was hopeful.

He kept at it while watching Daryl make the rounds through his domain. Caffeine joined in occasionally, bounding over to lick faces or hands as people woke up to Daryl's prodding.

Stanley waited until Daryl finished with Edward; one person he knew was level-headed—at least as level-headed as Edward ever was.

Edward was exactly as cheerful about everything as Stanley expected, which was to say extremely. "...why you always want to have someone on backup," he was saying to the others when Stanley stopped meditating. "Caffeine and Stanley here are the best ones for that. The number of times they saved our asses..."

He saw Stanley watching him and winked. "So how 'bout a round of applause for the heroes?"

"No," Stanley said when he saw a few heads swivel and hands come up. "Thought you were going to be the badass, Edward?"

"Hey, I was!" Edward said, hefting his wrench for emphasis. "Smashed 'em real good! Even when the bastards started digging the floor out from under us..."

"They adapted to stop you, didn't they?" Daryl said.

"Is that what that was?" Edward asked, turning to the other man. "All I saw was that they got harder to smash. That, and they started sendin' in all kinds of weird critters. Little sneaky buggers, prickly buggers, all kinds of magic, until Adrian's fire was the only thing keepin' em' away. At least until those blades came through the walls..."

Adrian was the only one still unconscious, and he didn't look like he was getting better. Cheesesteak wasn't much different, and only just this side of awake as he lay limply in Adrian's lap. Daryl was now the one keeping a fire going, with the small flame in his hand the only light in the dark tunnel.

Stanley checked his debuff timer and was pleasantly surprised to see only a few minutes remaining. His new meditation was definitely better, even if he didn't understand what the numbers meant. He glanced toward the remaining ants again... then sighed. "You know we can jabber about monsters anytime, right? Like, say, outside? Maybe while we fly toward a healer?"

"Hey, I was lettin' you rest, man!" Edward said while scrambling to his feet. "If you're good, I'm good."

Daryl glanced away when Stanley looked his way. "Sorry... for earlier, and I'd appreciate your help."

"Sure..." Then it was Stanley's turn to hesitate. "Actually, I need a couple more minutes..."

Edward laughed and hefted his wrench onto his shoulder. "Man, Stanley, you really wrecked em' this time. Figured you got that debuff thing again after the show, but that wasn't long at all!"

He was the only one enjoying himself among the huddled masses, and Stanley wrapped his soul shield back up against the mix of feelings bombarding him. It wasn't all bad. Most of them were just exhausted, with a mix of fear and awe...

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Kira was in the latter group, and the strangest one of them as she stared unblinkingly at him. At least until he met her gaze, and she looked away.

"...glowing eyes lighting up the tunnel! Hair billowing in an invisible breeze!" Edward paced while gesticulating excitedly. "It was like a movie, man! Hella, wicked, cool!" He stopped in front of Stanley and held up a hand. "High five!"

Stanley ignored the proffered hand, but Caffeine didn't. The man's exuberance had the pug excited, and he stood up to paw at Edward's hand, then sniffed it and dropped to all fours, disappointed. Probably because there was no food.

Caffeine abandoned Edward and instead sniffed at the ant carcasses littering the floor, then looked at Stanley with a pleading gaze. Stanley helped by sticking a chunk of ant meat into his own stomach. That was enough for the pug, and he went to town on the corpses.

Disgust radiated from almost everyone when Stanley kept eating, too. "What's it taste like?" Edward asked. "I'm hungry!"

"No idea," Stanley said, offering a piece to the man.

It wasn't a good flavor, if Edward's reaction was anything to go by, but Stanley's stomach didn't complain, so he kept shoving more in. He did that while staring at the floor, or rather, through it, as he stretched his mind deeper and deeper. If he could reach the queen from here...

He couldn't. The damn lair was deeper than any of the skyscrapers outside were tall. Way deeper. Wider, too. "You're still going to die, bitch," he murmured. "I'll come back for you."

"You didn't kill them all!?" Daryl’s blurted exclamation sounded incredulous... and accusing.

"It's a huge fucking lair!" Stanley shouted, the burst of anger surprising himself and everyone still awake, all of whom flinched back from him.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Sorry."

"I'm sorry," Daryl said after a moment. "I wasn't criticizing you... I just couldn't believe anything survived... whatever you were doing before."

"It's big," Stanley grumbled. "I was... hurting myself trying to reach too far." Caffeine had stopped him. Saved him from himself. Again.

"We can wait if you want to go kill the bitch queen." Daryl's soul was bloodthirsty now... "Assuming you killed all the nearby ants?"

Stanley liked the idea, but he shook his head. "They've got some sneaky ants that hide their souls. Can't be sure they aren't still around."

They also liked to hug the walls in such a way that his mind wouldn't notice anything upon a casual mental touch, and he couldn't scour every inch of the endless tunnels to root them out. Though his domain would find them if he got close enough...

"Take us with you," Daryl said, to a round of protests from the weaker people that hadn't passed back out, with a few notable exceptions, Kira among them. She was staring again...

"I want this place burned to the ground," Daryl continued, pulling Stanley's attention back to him. "They were way too smart... and they adapted to whatever we tried at a frightening pace. I don't know how they did it, and I don't want to give them a chance to do it again. What if they're already cooking up a counter for you?"

"Bitch can try." He and Caffeine would destroy them. Though maybe it wouldn't hurt to bring backup? Not that the exhausted people would be of much use... "I'm down if you are."

Another round of protest went silent after Daryl shouted, "You can stay here if you don't want to come!"

It was amusing. For once, Stanley wasn't the angry lunatic. Poor Princess. Unsurprisingly, no one volunteered to remain behind.

Stanley picked them all up and crowded them around him on all sides. It was almost like he was using them as human shields, which he wasn't. He just wanted them all inside his domain in case more of those ninja ants showed up.

The flight was a much more leisurely affair this time, as Stanley felt his way deeper through the tunnels.

He collected cores along the way—far from the total number that were up for grabs, but some. He split them all with Caffeine.

The final stretch only helped to confirm that the ants were far too intelligent, because there was only a single tunnel leading to the queen's chamber, and it was a long, winding tunnel that doubled back on itself repeatedly. A perfect funnel for monsters that could cut through the walls at will.

Daryl cast some magic he claimed would hide them. "Or it might not," he said. "Who knows with these things?"

Thanks to the winding tunnel, Stanley got plenty of time to feel out their destination before they got there.

It was a massive chamber, mostly filled with a honeycomb-like structure at the center. Over a thousand eggs were inside it, something Stanley only realized once they got close. The eggs were hatching at an alarming rate.

He could feel the queen crawling around inside the structure. She would stop at a group of eggs, do... something, and the eggs would hatch. Whatever she was doing, it changed each batch of souls drastically before they hatched. Including one group whose souls vanished the moment she worked her magic... His mind still felt them crawl from the splitting eggs, but the souls remained hidden. More ninjas.

The oddest part was that she wasn't the one laying any eggs. There were a handful of other ants running around doing that. Probably the ones responsible for the dozens of worker ants he'd encountered dragging corpses this way...

None of the ants reacted when Stanley flew them into the cavern. Did that mean Daryl's magic was working?

A line of worker ants only recently born filed past, and Stanley lifted everyone higher away from them. The line paused as the lead ant lifted antennae in a flailing gesticulation where they'd just been...

Could the ants smell them? They were supposed to use pheromones to communicate... right? At least that was how it used to work.

Stanley cut them down and immediately felt the queen bitch react to the deaths. Far too fast for mere pheromones. Psychic pheromones? Did she also know how they'd died? That, combined with her creating ant variants at will, would explain the rapid adaptation Daryl complained about.

He felt her anger rising inside the honeycomb, felt fear rising with it, and she sped up. The queen dashed between clusters of eggs, pausing at each only long enough to hatch them before dashing for the next. Each clutch burst from their eggs with only one overriding desire in their souls. To kill.

Each hatching clutch died to Stanley's will before they took their first steps, all of them carrying the increased psionic resistance he'd felt before... Each slaughter pushed the queen's outrage higher and increased her speed to the next group of eggs.

It was all useless. She couldn't win. She knew that. Stanley could tell she knew that... Her bitter despair felt surprisingly human as she finally abandoned the effort and charged out toward them.

Stanley half expected to see another human turned monster when he directed his will higher in the cavern and thought...

Light

The queen slid to a stop in the abrupt daylight level brightness, her head and antennae twitching as if she couldn't see them... She stood on four legs, almost upright, with the two front legs looking more like arms, but she didn't have a human face.

She also didn't take long to sense something, just like the worker ants had, her head zeroing in on the humans despite whatever Daryl's magic was doing.

"Is that the queen?" Daryl's voice sounded loud as it echoed throughout the cavern. Angry, too. "Kill it!"

The King has surrendered. Lair defeated.

King. That was new. Stanley very much doubted it was a king monster like that owl thing had been, but it might explain why there were multiple queens down here.

"Kill it!" Daryl growled. "I don't care if it surrendered!" He struggled, flailing at the air where Stanley still held him suspended. "Let me down! I'll kill it myself if I have to!"

Stanley flew ahead of the others to hover before the king. "Can you communicate?"

It glared at him from behind bug eyes, with bitterness and a drive to survive vying with the urge to attack him. There was no sign that it understood him...

Seeing what it could do with the eggs had given Stanley an idea. A vision. If they could work with these ants against the undead...

Who better to combat a horde of undead than an equally massive swarm of ants? Perhaps it could make ants that weren't affected by the miasma?

"Just fucking kill it!" Daryl yelled from behind him.

"Chill, man. Let Stanley talk to the ants if he wants to."

"Shut the fuck up, Edward! They almost fucking killed you! They almost killed... everyone."

Stanley sighed. There was a lot of hatred on both sides already, and the king, while clearly intelligent considering the tactics it employed, wasn't on the level of a human. Well, some humans. Hell, it was probably above average.

Caffeine growled at the ant king.

Whelp, guess that seals the deal, buddy.

DIE

The newly appointed queens have unanimously surrendered. Lair defeated.

"Kill them all! I don't want..."

"No," a new voice whispered.

Daryl choked off his shouting with a strangled cry as he looked down at the man in his arms. "Adrian! Are you..."

"Keep the queens," Adrian whispered. "If we can lure the ants to the tower..." He stopped talking when Daryl crushed him into a sobbing hug.

Stanley let them have their moment while he watched the queens inside the honeycomb nest. They felt like normal monsters running on instinct, and they just kept laying eggs. Only now, the older eggs began hatching immediately instead of waiting for the king.

Nothing fancy emerged. Just worker ants that wandered out of the nest and immediately started dragging the dead back inside. Their souls were about what he'd expect from an ant. "Food. Food. Food." The first one to make it back inside with a corpse met an ant coming the other way, and the second ant joined the chant.

Adrian's plan made a kind of sense, assuming these ants followed normal ant behavior. What was it? Get one ant to run back here from the tower with food, and it will leave a trail that more will follow.

It could work... but it seemed like a very convoluted way to hunt a few ants. It'd be easier to farm cores for the weaklings than to go to that much trouble to let them hunt their own.

"I don't want..." Stanley stopped talking. He still wanted them to help him talk with Caffeine... But didn't they owe him their lives? Again? "Fuck it. Let's get out of this shithole."

He grabbed a worker ant, took it along with everyone else, and headed for the surface far above. Walter was probably getting worried by now—well, more worried.