FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 255: Chapter 255: Great March

“Alright,” Sol said, gripping the heavy shaft of his Void-Oak spear. He turned his gaze away from the subdued army and toward the dark tunnel that led back to the surface. “Let’s go see what happened to the war of lords.”

He looked back at the Queen. She was a literal mountain of pale, translucent flesh, heavily injured, bloated to the size of a three-story building, and entirely incapable of walking under her own power. Her massive, withered legs twitched uselessly against the hardened earth of the dais.

“Okay, seems like we have a slight logistical issue,” Sol muttered, scratching his chin as he took in her sheer, immovable mass. He sent a questioning pulse down the mental link, essentially asking: How the hell are we getting you out of here? Do I need to build a giant subterranean wagon?

The Queen’s massive antennae twitched in response. She didn’t possess language in the human sense, but she transmitted a wave of calm, instinctual certainty through the Silver Liquid tether.

Sol watched in morbid fascination as a dozen massive, Layer 2 Commander ants detached themselves from the defensive perimeter. They scuttled up the dais, their superheated mandibles dimmed to a dull, safe ember, and positioned themselves carefully beneath the Queen’s sprawling, pale abdomen and heavy thorax. They slotted together like perfectly engineered, biological machinery.

With a synchronized, ground-shaking heave, the Commanders lifted the Queen entirely off the ground, supporting her colossal, multi-ton weight effortlessly on their broad, obsidian carapaces, acting as a living, multi-legged palanquin.

“Ah. Right,” Sol said, feeling slightly stupid as he watched the seamless maneuver. “You’re an ant queen. Of course you have a living palanquin made of your own terrifying children. Exploiting workers is common in all species, I really should have thought of that.”

Seeing the Queen comfortably elevated and ready for transport, Sol looked down at his own mud-caked, blood-stained boots, feeling embarrassed, he decided he wasn’t about to walk out of the dungeon on his own two feet like some low-level peasant. He was the absolute master of the hive now. It was time to upgrade his mount, not like he had any mount before.

He pushed another, very specific command down the link, ordering her to designate one of the Commanders to act as his personal mount.

She obliged and immediately, the largest and most heavily scarred Layer 2 Commander in the vanguard scuttled forward. It lowered its massive, terrifying head and crouched low to the ground in front of him, offering its broad, spiked back in absolute submission.

Sol smiled, deeply satisfied. This was much better.

He vaulted onto the Commander’s back, settling himself comfortably between two thick ridges of obsidian chitin that acted like a natural saddle. It was surprisingly ergonomic too.

The creature’s carapace was warm, radiating the immense, contained heat of its internal core.

Caught up in the sheer, intoxicating rush of his newfound power and the epic scale of the cavern, Sol puffed out his chest. He gripped his Void-Oak spear, pointing the obsidian tip dramatically toward the high ceiling like a conquering knight-king mounting his noble, albeit terrifyingly acidic, steed.

“My brave soldiers!” Sol declared loudly, throwing his chest out, his voice echoing grandly off the bioluminescent walls of the Royal Chamber. “Let’s go!”

Chirp. Drip.

Silence. Absolute, deafening silence.

The cavern remained entirely, painfully still. Not a single insect moved. Tens of thousands of unblinking, faceted eyes just stared blankly ahead.

Sol lowered his spear, his cheeks flushing with sudden, intense embarrassment. The acoustic echo of his heroic speech faded into a deeply awkward, heavy silence.

Right. They were ants. They didn’t speak human languages, they didn’t understand dramatic timing, and they certainly didn’t care about his Charisma stat. They only responded to the specific, chemical and telepathic commands of the Hive Mother.

Ahem, Sol coughed quietly, clearing his throat and projecting the actual command through the Silver Liquid link to the Queen. Move out. Head for the surface.

The Queen’s antennae twitched. A silent, high-frequency telepathic pulse washed over the cavern like a physical wave.

Instantly, the cavern exploded into a cacophony of clicking mandibles and scraping chitin. Thousands of rusted-red soldiers scrambled into perfect, geometric formation, creating a massive, living vanguard. The Commanders carrying the Queen began to march, their heavy, synchronized footfalls shaking the subterranean earth.

Much better, Sol thought, recovering his dignity as a hyped, imaginary soundtrack began playing in his head. The grand march had begun.

If I had a soundtrack right now, it would be aggressively epic, Sol thought, an involuntary, feral grin spreading across his face as his own Commander mount smoothly integrated into the center of the vanguard, carrying him forward with a terrifyingly fluid grace.

As they moved, Sol’s earlier question about how the colossal Queen would fit through the labyrinthine tunnels was quickly answered. They didn’t take the winding, claustrophobic path he had used to sneak in. The Commanders led the procession toward the very back of the Royal Chamber, where a massive, perfectly smooth tunnel… easily forty feet wide and reinforced with thick, glossy layers of dried resin… sloped upward at a gentle angle.

It was the Royal Highway, a dedicated, subterranean evacuation route designed specifically for her massive bulk.

The march upwards was surprisingly smooth. Sol sat comfortably on the back of his massive insect steed, the rhythmic, multi-legged gait completely lacking the jarring bounce of a horse. It was like riding a highly lethal hovercraft, lulling him into a strange, surreal sense of security.

After what felt like an hour of steady, upward marching through the sweltering dark, the tunnel finally began to brighten. The oppressive, damp air grew fresher, losing the suffocating, chemical stench of formic acid and replacing it with the intoxicating scent of freedom, crushed leaves, and morning dew.

Finally, the tunnel broke the surface.

His ant commander peeked its massive head out of the tunnel, and Sol was instantly bathed in glorious, warm sunlight

Sol blinked hard, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the sudden, glaring brightness. The nine moons of the night had vanished, replaced by the heavy, diffuse, purple-tinged sunlight filtering through the massive, overlapping canopy of the jungle. The fresh, morning wind hit his face, cool and clean against his sweat-stained skin. He took a deep, dragging breath, filling his lungs with non-toxic air. He felt incredibly refreshed, genuinely, profoundly happy to simply be alive and out of the dark.

But as his mount fully emerged from the tunnel, stepping out into the clearing, the smile faltered slightly

The Royal Highway had exited just to the East of the massive crater where the three-way war had taken place.

And it was absolute purgatory.

The forest floor, usually a vibrant, impenetrable maze of ancient flora, had been completely obliterated for hundreds of yards in every direction. It looked as though a localized meteor strike had touched down in the Great Orrath.

Trees the size of modern skyscrapers had been violently snapped into jagged splinters or ripped entirely from the earth, their colossal, petrified root systems exposed to the sky like the ribs of rotting leviathans.

The topography itself had been violently rewritten into a churning, apocalyptic wasteland of mud and gore. The broken, twisted bodies of massive Dreadwings, their beautiful translucent crystal wings shattered into millions of useless, glittering shards, were half-buried in the dirt, their stone armor cracked wide open.

Alongside them lay the massive, silver-backed Great Badgers, the undisputed heavy-tanks of the woods. Some were crushed under the sheer weight of fallen timber, while others were entombed beneath literal, rolling hills of thousands upon thousands of crushed, rusted-red ants. The sheer, unimaginable volume of insect corpses created grotesque, fleshy mounds that altered the very shape of the terrain.

The mud beneath Sol’s mount wasn’t brown, it was a slick, suffocating, blood-soaked crimson, intermixed with the glowing, toxic fluids of the fallen beasts. Deep, crater-like pools of bubbling, neon-green acid still smoked lazily in the diffuse morning light, hissing and popping as they slowly melted the petrified roots and dissolved the remaining bone into sludge. The air was thick, heavy, and tasted sharply of copper, formic acid, and vaporized flesh.

It was a horrifying, silent monument to the absolute, unforgiving brutality of the primitive world… a stark, visceral reminder that in this jungle, there was no honor in death, only the raw, chaotic scramble of survival.

However, as Sol looked closer, he noticed something incredibly strange.

“Hmmm, they haven’t been eaten or scavenged,” Sol muttered, looking closely at the untouched, fleshy corpses of the massive Badgers.

In a jungle this dense and hungry, a battlefield with this much fresh meat should have been absolutely swarming with opportunistic scavengers by morning. Yet, the crater was completely devoid of anything living.

“They haven’t been eaten or touched,” Sol muttered, scanning the untouched corpses. He patted the hard chitin of his mount’s neck. “It seems like the sheer territorial presence and the residual pheromones of you guys really deterred the surrounding beasts. Nobody wants to mess with the crazy acid ants.”

Sol raised his eyes, looking past the ruined crater, toward the distant North, the location where the two Layer 3 Lords, the Dreadwing and the Badger, had waged their apocalyptic duel.

Sol tapped his heavy boot against the thick chitin of his mount and sent a sharp, directional pulse to the Queen.

That way.

The Queen broadcasted the order. Immediately, the thousands of ants adjusted their sprawling formation and began their great march North.

It was a spectacle of terrifying, natural dominance. The earth physically shook under the combined weight of the horde. As the massive formation of black and rusted-red armor tore through the underbrush, snapping trees and flattening ferns, the jungle reacted with absolute terror.

Flocks of massive, four-winged birds erupted from the canopy in panicked flight. Distant roars of lesser beasts cut off abruptly, turning into the sounds of frantic scrambling as every living creature within a five-mile radius fled from the sheer, overwhelming fanfare of the advancing apex colony.

Sol sat comfortably on the back of his massive Ant Commander, completely insulated from the dangers of the deep woods by a literal moving wall of hyper-lethal bodyguards and of course thoroughly enjoying the intoxicating, tyrannical feeling of commanding an apex army that parted the jungle like the sea.

It was definitely a massive upgrade from running for his life.

He reached into his leather belt pouch, pulled out a strip of heavily salted, dried essence-meat and his waterskin, and casually ate his breakfast while his unstoppable legion carved a path straight toward the ultimate battle.