Chapter 289: Rose Orckalite
“The basic rundown is that most of the drones are peak-level drone monsters.”
“Peak drone feels like an oxymoron,” Rory said after a moment.
“You get the point; they’re about the pinnacle of strength a drone-class monster can be before crossing out of that threshold.”
“Got it,” Rory nodded.
“Scattered throughout the hive are Guards, Gate Guards, Elite Guards, and Royal Guards. Guards, Gate Guards, and Elite Guards are no big deal; they’re stronger than drone-class monsters, obviously, but they are still average monsters.”
“Royal Guards?”
“Alpha Variants, every single one of ‘em,” Eric answered. “And they aren’t the bigshots. That belongs to the Orckalite Ant Queen, Orckalite Ant King, a territory alpha, and more importantly, the Orckalite Avenger , a stronger exiled Ant King, and as you could probably piece together, a Territory Alpha.”
“I see why you needed a partner for this,” Rory noted.
“Up to the Ant Kings, I felt comfortable clearing everything myself if need be. But trying to solo a territory alpha? That’s some bullshit Allison might try, but me? Nah, I’ll pass.”
“This Orckalite Avenger- you mentioned it was a stronger Ant King?”
“Level-wise, they’re all level eighty. It’s more about the depth I felt from it. Also, it was the only one that sensed me. Once I scrambled, it went back to masking its presence.”
“A lot of information you gathered,” Rory said.
“Duh, you really think a bunch of ants could track me down?”
“Fair,” Rory said. “So, how do you want to tackle this? Guns blazing?”
“ Fuck no ,” Eric spat. “We cheat, and we cheat hard .”
“Speaking my language,” Rory chuckled. “By the way, what’s with the name? Orckalite?”
“Name of the ore they’re moving around. Rose Orckalite. The Queen seems specifically adapted to eating the stuff, and the drones she poops out all seem to have exoskeletons partially fabricated of the stuff.”
“See, now I’m curious about this stuff,” Rory said, the orckalite outside of his examination range. “You don’t have anything to mention about the stuff?”
“Nah, maybe because I’m not exactly a blacksmith, the description was blank for me, outside of it being graded as Rare.”
“Damn,” Rory grinned. “Rare grade right out of the box. Now I’m really curious.”
“Well, we get in there, clear the shit, and you get to investigate all you want,” Eric said.
“Sure, and I might just have an idea…”
“This feels unfair.”
“And that’s a problem?” Rory asked.
“Oh, absol-fuckin-lutely not,” Eric grinned.
The two were currently in a small ‘cave’ within the Orckalite ant hive, a random offshoot tunnel that Rory had sealed up as the two stepped through the shadows and appeared in. Unharried, the two had plenty of time to spare as they prepared to unleash hell on the hive in the form of a twin domain.
The small cave was surrounded by a bound circle, containing the effect from spilling until they were ready. Rather than unleash Nightfall, Rory had instructed Eric to imagine the skill ‘building’ like a balloon being filled with air. Taking hold of the slowly growing skill, Rory had added on top of it something possible only from his own experience with altering domains on the fly.
It still took the better part of ten minutes, which may as well have been an eternity in a real fight, for the duo to match up perfectly, but at last Rory found himself grinning, the already pitch-black cave now feeling as if it were submerged in a physical darkness the consistency of cement.
“Ready,” Eric answered, having gotten the sense as well.
“Then let's rock,” Rory nodded as, with his right foot, he reached out and smudged the bound circle, breaking the seal.
Instantly, like a pyroclastic flow of pure inky darkness, the hive was entirely submerged in darkness that choked out all light, save for a few twinkling red glimmers that twinkled like scornful stars.
“We’ve got three minutes, give or take fifteen seconds,” Eric said. “Meet you at the ant queen, shitface.”
“You’re on.”
The modifications to the Rogue’s domain were relatively ‘minor’ in that Rory had used his own domain as the chassis or support for the other man’s decidedly more dangerous domain, allowing it to propagate much further out.
Submerged in the darkness of the Primal Night, the ants found themselves choking to death, or the magical equivalent of it. For the few ants too strong to be wiped out by magical fumigation, the two teleporting Founders handled them, appearing and disappearing at will in the twin domain, the perfect environment for either of them to do so.
Two minutes and forty-six seconds later, the teleporting Founders appeared outside a rather foreboding chamber near the bottom of the tunnels as the darkness lifted all at once.
“You were off by fourteen seconds,” Rory said as he half-grinned at the Rogue, who rolled his eyes.
“Fuck you, I steal shit, not do math.”
For a hive filled with thousands of tier-eight monsters to have been handled in a measly two minutes was probably something even The First hadn’t expected, as domains were already rare at tier eight, much less an unheard-of unison domain.
Unison? Twin? Going to have to workshop the name for that.
Without any other fanfare, the two entered the largest chamber of the hive, coming face to face with an oversized ant queen that could have crushed a large home under her immense size.
Littered throughout the cave were the corpses of hundreds of tier seven grubs, dozens of tier eight worker ants, and a collection of royal guard ants that looked about as pissed off as giant ants could, pink spikes glistening with corrosive fluid and mandibles clacking furiously.
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The queen, a tier eight territory alpha, was entirely unfocused on them, her body disgorging tier seven grubs that went on to drag the corpses of their fellow ants over to the queen, who recycled the deaths by consuming the dead.
“A state of grief,” The Rogue sighed melodramatically. “How heart-wrenching a scene.”
“Yeah, totally,” Rory rolled his eyes.
Neither of them was all too worried about the queen; she didn’t have the ‘feel’ of a dangerous monster, a queen-class monster. Her main focus was clearly specialized toward propagation. No, the bigger issue was that they could both distinctly sense the Ant King hiding within the ceiling, ready to rip its way free once the fighting started.
The other concern lay far below, in a single sealed chamber where an even stronger Ant King was exiled: the Orckalite Avenger. The monster had detected them; both Rory and Eric had sensed something akin to an examination of them, but as the name suggested, it seemed entirely at ease with waiting until the end to make a move.
“So, when the fighting starts, the Queen is definitely going to begin pooping out guards like a factory missing its deadline.”
“Probably,” Rory agreed.
“And when the first round of guards don’t do jack shit, she is going to switch to Royal Guards.”
“Probably,” Rory repeated.
“And at some point, that ant king is going to join in on the fun.
“Probably,” Rory repeated himself yet again.
“Just making sure you had the same thoughts,” Eric grumbled. “I can handle the queen; she doesn’t seem dangerous as an actual combatant, but she probably isn’t going to die easily.”
“Leaving everything else to me, including the ant king?’
“See, you really are smart,” Eric said, slapping him on the back. “Let’s get to it?”
“Yeah, don’t see why not,” Rory sighed, finding himself in the rare position where he was the frontline.
Plan made, the two entered the chamber in earnest, walking shoulder to shoulder as the ants began to chirp, whirling to face them as they crossed some intangible threshold.
How best to do this?
Rory was already whipping up a plan, throwing out tactics that wouldn’t work.
Dragon’s Fall won’t do jack shit. I don’t have enough spacing to summon it here, but it would have been good for clearing a bunch of weaker monsters in one go. Empyrean Fulmination doesn’t feel like it would work well either; something about the ground's makeup down here would snuff it out.
Technically, he wouldn’t know for certain until he tried. Still, he’d been around the block enough times now that he had a fairly strong grasp of innate conceptuality, such as the sense that the environment here carried strong grounding properties.
Earth Soul normally would be a perfect fit, but again, something about the ground makeup of the First pushes back.
The fact that Earth Soul was being ‘blocked’ or his connection to the skill felt weaker everywhere on the planet was a point of excitement , because it meant there was something to be discovered there, but now wasn’t the time for proper research.
Well, back to basics.
Smiling to himself, Rory spread his arms out as golden circles appeared, first just a handful, and then dozens, until hundreds of the magical circles appeared, green phantasms emerging from them and appearing as real as any other thing within moments of emerging.
Seeing the display, the Rogue vanished, one moment lockstep with Rory, the next he was dropping down atop the ant queen, his daggers transformed into a shadowy polearm.
And just like that, the battle began in earnest as the chamber was awash in hundreds of projections launching outward, slashing apart the grubs and striking the royal guards. The royal guards, each being alpha variant monsters, were more than capable of withstanding the carpet-bombing of mass-produced projections.
Not that Rory was surprised, flickering into the air and locking himself in place as he continued to rain down hell. Meanwhile, the ant queen was silently thrashing as gouts of pink and green ooze burst free from its body wherever Eric struck, like a gnawing rat that wouldn’t stop harassing the oversized monster overflowing with vital energy, the wounds healing within moments only for another two to appear.
The royal guard ants converged, a shimmering dome of pink and black ‘metal’ appearing above them as Rory’s projections began harmlessly crashing against the summoned wall.
Interesting.
While Rory could have continued to hammer away at the transparent dome protecting the ants fruitlessly, he wasn’t quite that brain-damaged. Instead, the number of magical circles from which the projections emerged dropped to a tenth of the original, as the projected weapons took on a much more dangerous feel, shimmering with power as Rory switched to reinforced projections using denser pneuma.
That alone wouldn’t have been enough, but locking onto the weakest point of the dome, the projected weapons slammed into the barrier one after the other in perfect coordination.
The final piece of the puzzle was focused on defending themselves from Rory’s bombardment; they didn’t take notice as a spike of stone erupted in the midst of them, shimmering with blood red crystals, fully exploding a moment after.
The First might make Earth Soul harder to use, but that’s not the same as saying I can’t use it whatsoever.
With the stone spike exploding in their midst and temporarily distracting them, the protective dome waned before shattering all at once as his projections hammered into it.
Right on cue.
As if on signal, Rory suddenly felt a presence rapidly descending upon them, forcing him to flicker out of the way as the giant ant king appeared, dropping to the ground from above with a titanic boom.
To call it an ‘ant’ wasn’t doing it justice. Larger than even the queen, it stood atop six thick, stampeding legs, each one reminding Rory of the might of an oversized industrial train. Then there was the fact that it had three sets of scythe-like tusks and an omnidirectional mandible-mouth fusion. If anything, it reminded Rory of an alien fusion of a rhinoceros beetle and an oliphaunt, straight out of Middle-earth.
“Fuckin’ bigger when you see it in person,” Eric said as he suddenly appeared next to Rory, stepping free of a cast shadow, the walls gently glowing with pink light.
“It is a big bastard,” Rory agreed.
As if also agreeing, the ant king decided to roar , sounding like sheet metal shredded and torn apart in a compactor.
Perhaps the most shocking thing was when the ant king charged at them, moving so fast it seemed to dematerialize, forcing the two Founders to scatter with their individual teleportation techniques.
Reappearing, Rory wiped at his forehead, a cold sweat at the pure speed of the giant-sized monster.
I’m not sure if it’s literally the fastest monster I’ve ever seen, but it's definitely the fastest monster I’ve seen of such immense size.
Before them were two options. First, they could attempt to kill the ant queen, giving them a chance to focus on the ant king afterward. The bad part was that it would require ignoring the clearly stronger territorial alpha between them.
The other option was to ignore the ant queen to kill the ant king. That problem was that the ant queen had already switched to spawning royal guards. While an alpha variant monster was far less threatening than a territory alpha one-to-one, the calculus changed when there were dozens upon dozens of them.
Or.
Or they could stick to the initial plan; Rory could keep the ant king busy while Eric dealt with the ant queen.
Honestly…. Probably the best option.
It was a tactic that perhaps only their combination of Founders could pull off. The Rogue had some of the strongest damage potential attacks, albeit lacking severely in area-of-effect, meaning he was perhaps the Founder most capable of inflicting the sort of damage needed to kill the glorified punching bag that the ant queen represented, without giving it too much time to birth endless royal guards. Rory, meanwhile, was the most slippery Founder outside of the Rogue, the only one who could play keep-away with the ant king. Sure, the likes of Zoey could take more hits, but a territory alpha with the raw attributes of the ant king would even put Zoey in a bad spot in only a short time if she were facing it without support.
Flickering in front of the ant king, Rory felt like he could understand matadors, purposely goading the oversized bug into charging at him as he barely flickered away in time, the entire cavern shaking as the ant king slammed into a wall.
Meanwhile, Eric had gone back to getting stabby-stabby with the ant queen. Alarmingly, Rory noticed that the blood and ooze spilled began to congregate, forming into smaller versions of the royal guards, notably missing any levels indicating they were ‘constructs’ rather than proper living creatures.
“Whoa there,” Rory said, flickering again just in the nick of time as the ant king charged at him again, the speed of such a large monster still difficult to properly conceptualize.
Out of curiosity, Rory attempted to blast the ant king with some projections, only for them to harmlessly bounce off its thick chitin, even those which he took the time to project using the densest pneuma he could actively manipulate.
Well, that’s not great.
Seeing he wasn’t going to be doing much to harm the ant king for some time, Rory could only internally sigh, beginning to understand Zoey’s perspective from a firsthand standpoint.
I just hope he doesn’t take too long.