Third Person P.O.V:-

Looking back at the disappearing back of their prideful but caring leader, D’sue, Martha, and Enco couldn’t help but feel a heavy sense of pride being embedded into their souls. From the way he behaved to even the scolding that he gave, everything had a reason. A reason that they couldn’t help but feel intimidated just by thinking about, a pressure so huge that their shoulder buckled every time they thought about it.

How could they have known, the mission that they all took seemingly, believing their abilities and power would turn into a mud race for time?

How could they have known that the reward for the mission was not really a reward, but a trap used by the guild?

After thinking about it a bit, they could clearly feel something happening in the background, that they had no recognition of. Why was their no other team to competing with them for the mission? Why was the reward that could be considered good even for an ‘A’ rank mission given for just simple Ant extermination job?

When questions like these starting filling their heads, they understood that this mission was not as simple and easy as they gad thought it to be.

But what could they do about it now? It was not like thinking about it could change their situation. They were already here, so no matter what they had to do, they need to complete the mission or else die trying, as there was no turning back now.

Four of them were left behind by their leader, who took the middle road before anyone else could, and walked till he disappeared. They looked at each other for some time, saw how determined everyone was. They nodded their heads to each other like agreeing with expressions, before walking into the tunnels they had decided to travel through.

Though the journey ahead of them might bring them more than what they had bargained for, but instead of buckling on their knees under pressure, they walked with their heads held high and entered the tunnels with determined faces.

Like the tunnels that they had traveled until now, these tunnels were also going to lead them straight to an open space. In the tunnel even though they were walking step by step with an unwavering and strong force, but they were still feeling a sense of dread underneath their skin. They felt Goosebumps entering those dark horrible tunnels once again, but this time with only one person to depend on.

The tunnel in which D’sue and Martha were walking in had a little dull atmosphere. Though they were attentive towards their surroundings, but they were still a little to silent considering Martha’s character.

“Sir D’sue, Can I ask you something?” A voice echoed inside the tunnel, but no one responded to it.

The knight who was walking in front of an orange caped fire mage, had all of his senses topped to the best of his ability. He was very busy trying to see if the roofs or floors had any traps installed in them. Cause of the entire information that they their leader explained to them, he knew exactly what kind of a situation they were in.

Though he knew that ants aren’t very strong individually but who knew how many and from where those ants might come to surprise them, so he was carefully taking note of his surroundings. Even though was not a professor on monsters, but because everyone who has wants to become strong and advance in guild ranking needed to have some basic information about every type of monsters there are, he also knew something’s about them.

From the information that he knew about ants there was one thing that was making his headache and keeping him vigilant. He knew an ant uses pheromones and some chemical stuff to attract their kin’s towards an assailant or food.

Even though he didn’t know the exact term logy for it, but the result was what he really cared for anyway. When an ant finds an assailant attacking their hive they release some kind of danger pheromone that attracts all the other fighter ants towards him. Now, this may seem like the run of a mill thing, but he knew exactly how bad it would be for them if the encountered an ant out of nowhere and gave it enough time to give away their position. That would turn, extremely bad for them in seconds. Who knows, how many ants would come to surround them and start attacking them from everywhere.

If someone sane heard him talking such things and saw him being so vigilant cause of ants then he would think him as someone crazy. They would say things like, ‘how could a dignified person like him, a ‘B rank’ individual, with such a high rank be afraid of ants.’

But normal people don’t know how the ranking system really works. A guild is not only a place which provides crazy killers a place to act like a hero or only allow jobs that involving killing and plundering or missions that risks an individual’s life, but they are also asked by common people to find personals to help them with works like; cleaning, assistant jobs, herb gathering and other small jobs.

Now for jobs like these, there is no way that a guild could ask people like popular mages and the like to start sweeping or to build a house for someone.

 But a Guilds also need to accept such jobs, because such jobs not only increases their image in the society, but also create a friendlier atmosphere for them to work in. The adventurers who complete dangerous jobs are also praised by people everywhere, which give them more than enough reason to keep being an adventurer, and to do more and more risky missions, just for that popularity.

So who does those; small time, low paying and time consuming Jobs that are posted by local workers or farmers and the like?

All of such not so popular jobs are done by those individuals who have newly joined the guild. These includes all the individuals with F and E rank and it is mandatory for them to complete at least 20 such jobs before they are allowed to upgrade their rank.

 All the adventurers who have D and C Rank are allowed to choose jobs that are threats to normal people but are no or little threat to their lives. They handle missions like fighting small time thugs, arresting muggers and pocket pickers or doing work like acting as a detective and such.They are also sometime asked for escort jobs, traveling with merchants to nearby areas and sometime jobs like killing of normal animals or weak magical beasts like a Grey wolf or goblins are also posted under the ‘C-D’ Mission bracket..

This also means that the real dangerous jobs start from B rank. But even these ‘B rank’ parties are not allowed to go on a mission that is clearly not possible for them to complete at all. Jobs like monster extermination and small time exploration comes under their belt.

 There are a lot of rule placed on the individuals, and the rewards for low ranking jobs are also low, but the adventuring guild has never ever in their entire life faced a situation when there was a decrease in the number of people joining to become an adventurer. And the reason for such a boom in adventuring business is because of all the new legends that are being created one after another every day. 

…………..

D’sue ’The Knight’ was still stressing over the ants and their methods, when he heard a sweet voice calling out to him, “Hey, Hey, HEY!” a flustered Martha was yelling at him from behind, while he was lost inside his own thoughts.

He looked back at the source of the noise that had caught his attention and saw an agitated pretty bimbo starring daggers at him. He couldn’t’ help, but stop and ask her, “What! What? Why are you suddenly yelling at me? What happened?”

“What happened my ass!” she said in a high pitch tone mocking him, “You know for how long I have been yelling at you, but you were so lost inside your own mind that you gave no attention to me!” She said, while the light ball beside her started flickering in and out of existence, clearly showing how angry she was. But a flickering light source inside a dark tunnel really was the sight to behold.

“*Sigh!* so tell me what happened?” He asked but he saw that she was too busy trying to bring the balls radiance back to normality and couldn’t pay any attention to him. He smiled looking back at her thinking, ‘Why is she so scared of darkness? Nothing’s going to come to bit…maybe it’s that after all.’

He rotated his neck from left to right, before nodding back before he started walking again. But just as his eyes turned to look the front, his lips twitched once before he frowned. What surprised him was that the end to the tunnel was already near and he could clearly see another open space behind it. He stopped walking and stood there silently in the middle of the tunnel. Martha, who was still playing with her light ball while moving, crashed head first on his back.

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She looked up and saw a wall blocking her view. She was going to burn it out of anger when she noticed that it was not a wall that she had crashed into, but her giant partner.

Her partner is no giant in normal sense. He is just a bit bigger than most people, but with a height around 6’8” he surely did looked like a giant in front of a 5’6” girl like her.

She yelled and cursed at him asking, why the hell did he stop suddenly, but before she could say anything more, he moved his right hand and placed it on her mouth to stop her racket. After doing so he got a little close to her bent on his knees and starting whispering to her, looking straight into her eyes, “Shut up! Don’t speak even a single word. Right now we are standing near the tunnel end, and we don’t know how many monsters there might be waiting for us outside. So stop playing around, now is not the time for this.”

Her eyes bulged out, but she stopped struggling. Seeing that she had calmed down a little, he removed his hand from her mouth and nodded at her. To his nod she nodded back.

Her cheeks redefined a little from looking straight into his eyes. No matter how much a free spirit she seemed, she was still a girl in her teens after all. His sudden actions like that made her flustered cause of his actions and her heart started beating faster and faster looking at his back.

But on the other side D'sue who looked like an adult, had no idea of what she was going through because of his seemingly natural action.

She was going to say something to him, but without letting her do so, he turned back to face toward the end of the tunnel again. Her now pink face also turned normal from seeing how he was acting out of consideration. She sighed once before also moving her face away from his back to look outside the tunnel.

He said there might be monsters waiting for them in the open space. To check whether this really was the case she started pouring her mana inside the light ball. The radiance from her light source was strong, but it was not strong enough to completely light all the area outside the tunnel. To this problem Martha had a very simple solution.

"Close your eyes."

"Wha..."he could only say this when she poured an excessive amount of her mana inside the light ball, over loading it, and fired it toward the end of the tunnel.

It zoomed past them both and entered the open space, but just as it did, she snapped her finger and all her mana that she had poured inside it started rebelling and very soon most of it started going out of control. The ball of light started distorting and changing shapes and it looked like there was something inside it, trying to come out. And once it reached a point of no return, the ball exploded.

Because she poured too much mana inside it, the ball of light overloaded and blasted into a frenzied flash of light. There was no blast or explosion, no shock waves were formed and there was also no damage done to the insides of the open space, but a flash of light engulfed everything. The radiance it emitted was very strong; it completely converted the inside of that completely dark tunnel, white.

Just as the light spread to every corner of the tunnel and beyond, they heard a monster. It was cry so loud that their ears started ringing and they started hearing buzzing sounds all of a sudden. Turned out there really were ants hiding inside the open space and because of them having never faced light before, a simple attack like that took then out and knocked them cold.

Even though both of their eyes were closed but they still heard two thugs ring inside the cave, after the awfully loud cry stopped. Slowly they opened their eyes. The sudden burst of eyes blinding light was now nowhere to be seen and the natural environment of the cave had returned back.

Martha couldn’t help but jumped once, when she saw that the darkness that she has been fighting from the start was back again. Her hands started shaking and she hurriedly castes another light ball to ensure her safety. D'sue saw her struggling again and couldn't help but sigh to it.

Because of Martha's quick reaction’s, light once again returned to the deprived tunnel. But what they saw left them a little confused, and to a huge degree astonished.

The ants they were looking at, really were monsters. They had never watched or heard about ants so huge before. There were two of them and both were lying on the ground, motionless. D'sue moved and got closer to the ant just to get a clear look on them.

The ant was jet black in Color with wide black eyes. In terms of height, this ant was almost reaching his navel. Now compare that with his almost seven foot tall reach and you get a five foot tall ant. It was almost the same height of the mage, who was staring at it with her perfect round eyes.

Its legs were pointed, like spear and had small hairs on them. The most dangerous looking thing in an ant is not its legs or their Antennas, but its head and its mandible.

 The head looked dis proportioned according to its body size. It alone was 2 something meters long and equally wide. Their mandibles were really big and looked even more menacing cause of their size. They looked ready to snap away others necks. Even though D’sue was only observing them from far but he could still guess that they were sharp enough to cut through his armor.

But unlike before, where they vanished into thin air after sometime, this time instead of disappearing into thin air both of them starting shaking their heads, and before knowing when, they once again cried out loud and stood up.

Looking intimidated, D'sue knew they were going to attack him. Because out of over confidence he had traveled a little too close to them, without confirming whether they were dead or not. So, he was sure that no matter what kind of luck he was born with, he would have to confront them both.

Even though both of them looked a bit unfolding, but he knew no matter how powerful they both were there was no way that only two ‘F Rank’ ants attacking him could harm him at all.

He put his shield in front of him and removed him sword from the scabbard with his right hand. With sword in his right and shield in his left his setup was complete. The monsters flinched. One of them took a step back, feeling intimidated by his aura, and just when he found it covering, he rushed toward it.

The other ant also moved, but it was clearly much slower than him. It looked almost not moving, when comparing his speed with the knight. With the shield in his left hand he rushed and directly collided with the ant. Though it must have looked like there was no way for the ant to get hurt from just a collision, but the momentum from running and a sudden increase in speed due to the skill he used, created enough power in his charge, to not just hurt the ant but to blow it away.

The now flying ant collided, head first with the wall and turned into bloody flower. It simmered the wall with its body juices and turned the ant into an artistic masterpiece.

The other ant had also moved at the same time, so just when his shield collided with the scared ant, the other one had also charged upon him.

During this time, forget about moving his sword and attacking or even blocking its attack, he didn’t even have enough time to turn head around to look at it. He could only grit his teeth and let the ant attack him, hoping that his armor would hold on against its sword like sharp mandibles.

It's not like he had no confidence in his heavy armor, but the things that they had to face were much more cruel and sharper than the sharp fangs of the wolves that they had faced before.

Like that the ant collided with his body and the impact carried him forward. He was plunged into the air and fell face first on the floor, but the momentum carried him forward, as he kept on sliding on the floor with his body before he stopped after skidding for some time.