The seven ants walk into our light and come to a stop about fifteen feet away from us, forming a line from wall to wall, blocking the path deeper into the colony. They wiggle their antennae towards us, and I feel small pulses of mana from them reach out toward me, trying to scan us or something.
Daniel takes a bullet from his bandolier and gets ready to shoot it. I feel the mana his skill is using building up in his hand, waiting to be released as he turns to me and says, “Can you open a rift to the side of them?"
Immediately seeing what he wants to do, I smile and oblige, opening a rift in front of his hand that leads right next to the ants.
“Fire.”
A crack echoes throughout the tunnel as three ants get obliterated by Daniel's shot, instantly dying and giving me notifications.
[You have slain multiple creatures]
[Level 17 Defender Ant]
[Level 13 Defender Ant]
[Level 14 Defender Ant]
Corvax rushes forward as soon as he sees the carnage, swinging his massive axe down on the ant closest to him. The exoskeleton of the ant holds up against the cutting force of the axe, so its head gets crushed against the floor instead of chopped off. Corvax lifts his axe up as the next ant turns and starts clicking its mandibles at him. He brings the spike down this time, and another ant dies without putting up a fight.
Daniel joins the fight next, using his hammer to help Corvax kill the last two while I just watch, unable to do as much direct damage to the ants as either of them. Right before the last ant dies, it sends some kind of magical pulse down the tunnel, back to where it came from.
Once the ants are dead, I cut one open to see if they have a mana crystal growing inside like the Wind Leopard did. After ten minutes of digging around in an ant corpse with my knife, I finally find it and cut it out. It’s very low quality, and it’s smaller than a grain of rice while also being lower in quality than even the white crystals. Hmm, the ants need to be bigger before the crystals are of a good enough size to harvest.
We continue down the tunnel, towards the boss, hopefully. All of the side tunnels are now abandoned. No more worker drones are digging new paths in the compacted dirt.
“Do you think that last ant sent some kind of magical warning to the rest of the colony?" Daniel asks me.
“Probably, which means the rest are waiting for us.” I respond.
“We’ll see soon enough.”
A few minutes later I notice more ants coming towards us, the same defender kind as before, but a whole swarm of them this time. After stopping the group, I wait until all of them enter my perception before I give the group any more info. The last five ants in the group are of a new variety. They have much less armor but are bigger overall, coming up to about my waist, and have some obvious mana flowing through them, leaking out a little bit.
“There are almost fifty of the defender ants, and at the back are a few ants of a new variety. The new ants have more mana than the rest. They might be some kind of ranged attacker type.”
“Can you take care of the new ones while Corvax and I hold back the rest?” Daniel asks while we move to a better position right before a corner, hopefully cutting off the line of sight to the ants in the back.
“I can try. Just keep the other ants held back.”
Both of the other men give me a nod before they get into position, weapons raised for attack. Once the ant front line meets ours, the tunnel soon turns into a battlefield, with both Corvax and Daniel being slowly pushed back by the oncoming horde.
I turn my focus to my targets, what I’m calling ‘mage ants,’ because they are ants who use magic. Once the fighting starts, they all start releasing mana from their bodies, gathering it up into one big cloud before it starts to move down the tunnel toward the front line. Each ant the cloud touches absorbs a little bit of mana from it until it reaches the front of the group and runs out, the last few ants getting nothing before they are killed by my companions.
The next row of ants, those who absorbed some of the mana, are moving much faster than before and seem to be biting harder and also taking less damage, oftentimes needing three or four hits before they die.
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Ah, they used some kind of buff on the ants, making them tougher and stronger. Well, now that the mage ants have stopped moving, it should be easy enough to open a few rifts and kill them.
I focus on the space right above the last ant in the group, hoping to kill it quickly before the others notice. I feed mana into [Space Control] and start creating the rift, the same as I always do. Just a few moments after I start, my still-forming rift gets flooded with mana from the mage ants, destabilizing it to the point it collapses.
I try again, this time over a different ant and with much more mana. I create the rift and do everything in my power to stabilize it before it collapses. Once again, my rift is flooded with the ants' mana and fails to fully open, leaving them to continue buffing their allies.
I need to come up with a new strategy. Daniel and Corvax are counting on me, and now they’re getting pushed back faster and faster by the stronger ants. Maybe a full-blown portal would be stable enough to withstand whatever they do to collapse my rifts, but I can’t keep a rift stable near them for long enough to attempt to turn it into a proper portal. If I take too long here, my companions will suffer for it.
Suddenly, a plan forms in my head, and I know what I need to do.
I lock on to a space floating mid-air behind the ants, far out of their range, and another one just in front of me, on the tunnel floor. I push mana into my skill and start forming a rift, stabilizing it once it manifests. Then, I push even more mana into it, willing not just a connection between two points in space, but a window stable enough to see through. My mana levels drop as I mentally define where the borders of the portals will be and how they connect to each other. After a few seconds of concentration and nearly a quarter of my mana, a portal opens up in front of me, causing a new notification to pop up and promptly be ignored.
It’s a perfect circle, about the size of a manhole, with a light green border made from my mana. Forming it took a lot of mana, but keeping it stable is relatively cheap, following the usual trend I’ve seen with space magic. With a deep breath I look down into the portal, seeing the floor of the tunnel on the other side of the ants, about six feet down. A small smile tugs at the corner of my lips as my blood starts pumping faster and faster in preparation for what’s to come. I take one last look at my comrades, covered in ant blood and swinging their weapons like madmen at the horde in front of them.
I take a step forward and drop through the portal, landing on the ground with mana-boosted legs over thirty feet behind the mage ants. I cut off my mana flow to the portal, letting it close as I burst forward toward the nearest ant, plunging my sword into its thorax as soon as I reach it. I ignore the notification as I tear my sword free from the first ant and stab into the next, finally gaining the attention of the other three.
The closest one launches some kind of mana burst at me, but I respond in the same way they reacted to my rifts, by sending a big blast of raw mana at it, blowing the attack apart before it reaches me. That ant falls next, but before I can get to the last two, they both launch the same burst attack toward me. I manage to blast one of them apart, but I’m too slow to get the second, and it hits me square in the chest, causing me to stumble backwards from a wave of nausea and sudden lethargy.
The foreign mana invades my body like a virus, trying to weasel its way into my bloodstream and organs. I feel myself get more and more tired while the nausea ramps up and the world starts spinning. Only my spatial perception and [Mana Sense] work without much impairment, letting me see that the ants are preparing for another attack.
Without much time to react, I drop to the floor right as they release the mana, barely dodging under it in time. Now, with a few seconds to think, I start gathering my mana in my chest and sending out pulses through my body, slowly washing away the attack that hit me earlier, allowing me to fight with a somewhat clear head.
I manage to skewer the next mage ant before it gathers enough mana for an attack, and the last one dies right after I counter its last futile attempt to debuff me, or whatever that attack does. The remaining defender ants never even realize I’m behind them as I slowly and methodically kill them with stabs aimed between their armor plates.
After a few minutes the buff on the ants fully runs out, returning them to their previous weaker state. As the ant numbers steadily dwindle, my comrades and I eventually meet up as the last of the ants die to our weapons.
Corvax looks confused to see me come from the other side of the ants, but Daniel just gives me a huge smile, saying, “Finally managed to teleport?”
I give him an equally big shit-eating grin. “They kept closing any rift I made near them, so I said fuck it and opened a portal behind them to jump through.” I hold up my sword covered in ant blood. “The rest was just stabbing ants.”
“What kind of ants were they back there? Anything nasty?”
“Some kind of mage ant, I think. Let me check.” I say as I open my notifications.
[You have leveled up multiple active skills]
[Space Control] lvl 14
[Mana Shaping] lvl 13
[You have leveled up a passive skill]
[Mana Sense] lvl 12
[You have slain multiple enemies]
[Level 17 Support Ant]
[Level 19 Support Ant]
[Level 21 Support Ant]
[Level 18 Support Ant]
[Level 17 Support Ant]
[Level 13 Defender Ant]
[Level 14 Defender Ant]
…
[You have leveled up to level 19]
Wow, I gained a lot more from that fight than I expected. All of my skills leveled up, and so did I. I guess I did have to push them all in new ways during the battle, and I’m still pulsing waves of mana through my body to get rid of the ants’ mana still affecting me.
“They are called support ants, and they are really easy to kill if you can get close. They use mana to buff their allies, and they can hit you with an attack that makes you tired and nauseous, though it’s not too hard to deal with.”
Both my companions nod at my summary of the new ant, likely thinking about how they can counter them.
“I could use a bit of a breather before we continue. I used a lot of mana to open that portal and kill the ants. What about you guys?” I say as I look at each of my companions, looking at their condition after that fight.
Corvax looks fine, save for some light bites and scrapes on his legs. His axe looks fully charged still, meaning those ants weren’t tough enough to make him use the enchantment, and by looking at the four massive cannons he calls his arms, I can see why.
Daniel looks tired but has only ant blood covering him. While he was alone in the dungeon, he made some changes to his armor, adding metal plates along his arms and legs for added protection. It might also let him move around better with the use of his [Metal Manipulation] skill.
“We can take a few minutes if you need, especially if it means you can take out their support next time,” Daniel responds, walking further into the tunnel. “I’m going to sit at the other end and make sure no more ants bother us for a bit.”
I follow Daniel back to the bodies of the support ants and stop there. I pull out my knife and start cutting into their corpses, looking for mana crystals. Eventually I find it growing in some organ that I’m pretty sure is not a heart. After testing the first one, which is only slightly worse than the one I got from the Wind Leopard, I cut out the other four and put them in my storage core.
Shortly after, Corvax joins us up front, and we all sit down for a while to regenerate mana and make small talk. An hour passes with nothing happening before I see the next ant enter my spatial perception range, causing us to stand up and get back to ant killing.