FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 257: Chapter 257: Ambushing The Enemy

The fur instantly hardened, transforming into thick, jagged spikes of solid stone that formed an impenetrable, biological fortress around its body. The acid slammed into the stone, hissing violently as it began to melt the armor.

But the Badger possessed an absurd, biological anti-venom resistance. It simply ignored the toxic fumes and the searing heat, rapidly shedding the melting stone spikes and instantly regrowing new ones from its essence reserves, tanking the catastrophic damage with terrifying tenacity.

In retaliation, the Badger slammed its massive, glowing claws into the earth. It didn’t aim for the Dreadwing itself, it aimed for the space beneath it. A localized shockwave of gravity-crushing force erupted upward, visibly distorting the air, attempting to rip the agile insect from the sky.

The Dreadwing, relying on its monstrous, multi-faceted vision, predicted the strike. It pivoted in mid-air, shifting its momentum entirely backward in a physics-defying maneuver, hovering effortlessly just outside the range of the crushing gravity well before initiating another blistering run.

Speed versus Defense. Corrosive Acid versus Indestructible Stone.

It was an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.

Sol watched the epic clash for several long minutes, his pragmatic, analytical mind working in overdrive.

“I can’t just wait this out,” Sol muttered to himself, his silver-crimson eyes darting from the warring Lords to the thousands of frenzied lackeys tearing each other apart on the periphery.

It was the classic third-party dilemma. Even if one of the Lords eventually won this brutal war of attrition, the victor would still be surrounded by thousands of fiercely loyal, surviving lackeys.

He couldn’t just casually stroll into the center of a valley filled with hundreds of Layer 2 Omen-Bloods, tap the exhausted boss on the head with his Blood-Jade, and walk away. The sheer numerical disadvantage would overwhelm him instantly.

And he couldn’t just order his ant army to charge straight in, either. Even with thousands of highly coordinated soldiers and his terrifying Queen, throwing them into that chaotic, open meat grinder was a terrible play.

The enemy lackeys were too concentrated. If his swarm got bogged down fighting a massive wall of Layer 1 and Layer 2 Badgers, the Lord Dreadwing would simply hover out of reach and carpet-bomb his entire colony from the sky until nothing was left but melted chitin.

He needed to thin the herd. He needed to manipulate the board state before engaging the kings.

Sol silently slid down the massive, slanted tree trunk, his boots touching the mud. He turned his back on the valley of death and slipped through the shadows, returning to the concealed perimeter where his massive army waited in absolute, terrifying silence.

He walked past the towering ranks of frozen Layer 2 Commanders, approaching the living palanquin that supported the massive Queen.

Sol didn’t speak. He placed a bare hand directly against the thick, obsidian armor of her thorax, bypassing the physical world entirely and establishing a direct, highly complex conceptual link through the Silver Liquid.

Do not launch a full frontal assault, Sol projected the command, feeding her a clear, tactical visualization of the valley he had just scouted. The enemy is too concentrated in the center. We need to whittle them down. Break the vanguard into small, highly mobile hunting packs. Ten to twenty soldiers led by a single Obsidian Commander.

He felt the Queen’s massive intellect receive the complex order, processing it with the cold, calculating efficiency of an apex hive-mind.

Circle the entire perimeter of the valley, Sol continued, refining the strategy. Use the dense brush. Stay in the shadows. Do not engage the main force. Ambush the stragglers, the injured, and the isolated groups fighting on the far edges. Drag them into the darkness and butcher them quietly. Dwindle their numbers. Leave no trace.

The Queen absorbed the complex tactical command without hesitation. As the absolute Sovereign of the hive, her processing power for coordinating millions of individual units was unparalleled.

She twitched her massive antennae.

A silent, targeted frequency rippled through the resting horde. The rusted-red sea of soldiers began to seamlessly, flawlessly fragment. They scuttled, lowering their bodies until their abdomens brushed the mud. They broke into hundreds of perfectly coordinated strike teams, melting away into the dense, towering jungle foliage that ringed the valley of death.

Sol vaulted back onto his personal Commander mount, staying safely concealed just inside the tree line, and watched the guerrilla warfare unfold.

It was a terrifying masterclass in predatory efficiency. The ants were the ultimate biological assassins.

On the far western edge of the valley, a pack of six Great Badgers, heavily wounded, bleeding from deep aerial acid strikes, and panting heavily, had pulled back from the main melee to catch their breath near a cluster of petrified ferns.

They never saw the hunters coming.

From the thick, violet underbrush, twenty rusted-red soldiers silently surged forward. They didn’t roar to announce their presence. They simply moved like a collective shadow, latching onto the Badgers’ thick hind legs. Their razor-sharp mandibles clamped down, slicing cleanly through the tendons with sickening crunches.

As the massive mammals collapsed into the mud with guttural cries of shock and pain, a massive, fifteen-foot Layer 2 Obsidian Commander dropped from the branches of a Void-Oak above them. It landed with heavy, concussive force, its superheated scythes flashing in the diffuse light, cleanly decapitating three of the badgers in a single, blurring, horizontal arc.

Before the remaining three mammals could even draw breath to sound an alarm, the soldier ants swarmed their faces, clamping their jaws shut and dragging their massive, thrashing bodies backward into the deep shadows of the jungle. Within ten seconds, the area was completely empty, leaving nothing behind but smeared blood in the dirt.

This silent, brutal execution repeated itself across the entire circumference of the battlefield.

Grounded Dreadwings, their delicate crystal wings torn and unable to achieve liftoff, were methodically swarmed from the bushes and systematically dismantled. Their legs were sheared off, their acid sacs ruptured, and their bodies dragged into the dark. Small skirmishes between isolated Badgers and Dreadwings were abruptly ended as ant squads ambushed both sides simultaneously, cleaning up the combatants with ruthless prejudice.

Slowly but surely, the sheer volume of lackeys populating the valley began to noticeably thin out. The edges of the battlefield were being effectively and quietly neutralized. The chaotic roar of the melee began to lose its deafening volume.

But the beasts of the Great Orrath were not entirely mindless, and they were certainly not entirely blind.

As the numbers on the periphery visibly dropped, and the piles of their own dead began to suspiciously vanish into the tree line, the Layer 2 Omen-Blood commanders among the Badgers and Dreadwings began to sense the shift in the atmosphere.

A massive, heavily scarred Badger Commander, standing near the center of the valley, suddenly paused its assault on a low-flying Dreadwing. It raised its snout, sniffing the humid air aggressively. Its eyes widened as the distinct, sharp, overwhelming stench of formic acid finally cut through the heavy smell of blood and ozone.

It let out a deafening, warning roar, slamming its massive paws into the ground and bristling its stone-spiked fur.

Across the valley, the surviving lackeys suddenly broke off their frantic engagements with each other. The Dreadwings hovered higher in the air, their crystalline wings humming as they frantically scanned the dark tree line. The remaining Badgers formed tight, defensive circles, their glowing eyes staring out into the dense jungle.

They were vigilant. They had noticed the missing bodies. They had smelled the ants.

The element of surprise was officially gone.

Sol sat atop his massive ant mount in the shadows, leaning casually against the shaft of his spear. He didn’t frown. He didn’t panic. He knew this moment was inevitable, you couldn’t silently assassinate thousands of apex predators without eventually tipping off the elites.

“Well, As expected, I knew that wouldn’t last forever,” Sol muttered, a cold, ruthless smile spreading across his face as he watched the enemy lackeys bunch up defensively. “It was already a massive win that we thinned them out this much. But I suppose playtime is over.”

It was time for phase two.