Blade Over Magic

Get Countered

The next few days passed in such a manner.

Every day, the ants would launch a new assault, each with a new variants of ants that, under normal circumstances would have been more difficult to deal with.

However, due to Aubrey’s spoofing, the new variants that came out rarely ever had the intended effect.

To be clear, the new adaptations the ants had weren’t singular. For instance, there was a certain type that had been made to resist the nonexistent earth wall. Their bodies were made in such a way were external magic had a difficult time manipulating their bodies, so other than resisting the perceived certification effect, they actually had a level of resistance against most body manipulation magic, like spells meant to make them spontaneously combust from the inside, or spells meant to make their blood too thick or expand rapidly, causing them to explode.

The issue was... Curtis’s ice walls didn’t just manipulate the body. In fact, saying that would be misleading. They simply acted as a vacuum for temperature where thermal energy got sucked inside, leaving nothing but an absence of temperature. So it was for naught.

Besides that, there were more variants of the ranged ants. Some were capable of firing stingers which were weaker than their original brethren but were unleashed far faster, like a machine gun. Others acting like flying tanks and possessed immense defenses while also having very powerful ranged attacks but fired at a very slow rate. The latter didn’t actually use physical rounds but emulated the magic artillery Landor used, pulling in the surrounding mana and transforming it into a specific attribute before unleashing a singular beam of destructive energy.

As the ants had witnessed this a lot before Aubrey managed her spoofing, there wasn’t much she could do to prevent them from making them adapt to it.

However, Landor hadn’t been sitting on its hands either.

Those parts of the shield ants that the captain had specifically asked for them not to destroy? Well, its mages and engineers had unraveled how they worked, and the result was them reverse-engineering the magic reflective shields.

Normally, such things wouldn’t be super effective as everything was happening within the span of a few hours or more. However, that specific adaptation had a replicable aspect that allowed its effectiveness to spike considerably, and that was the existence of the linchpin. The whole point of the evasive creature was to act as an anchor which allowed the shields to remain stable and effective.

Using this as a base, Landor managed to establish several of its own ’anchors’. And since they were stationary, they were more effective as they followed ’true’ anchors.

Hence, when the third version of the ranged ants appeared, the Captain specifically told the elite team not to block them and allow them to attack. The result?

Where Landor’s original shields were meant to endure the brunt of powerful, rapidly expanding spheres of immolating heat, the new set of barriers which sat outside them endured the blast, took that energy, and then sent it right back at the ants, effectively countering them.

Then there were these ants which Xander believed were made specifically to counter him. This, he’d admit, unnerved him quite a bit.

Compared to the other ants, they were small. Almost smaller than normal worker ants. However, their speed was nothing to scoff at, and rather than crawling on six legs, the four back legs acted like a base for movement while the last two front legs took the shape of sharp sickles, and they sat on an ”upper body” that had quite the range of movement. On top of that, their bodies excreted a slippery substance that caused most blows to glance off them.

Xander did an honest evaluation of himself and guessed that the version of him who was still in Avoma would have struggled considerably against them. They were truly a bunch of insidious foes that would be the nightmare of many swordsmen.

Not that it mattered too much. After all, the queens only seemed to have made these ones adapt to the version of him that used purely swordsmanship and physical movements to kill a huge number of ants. So he made relatively quick work of them.

There did appear to be ants that looked like they were adaptations to Curtis’s ice and Falael’s starlight which the ants witnessed before Aubrey’s interference, but like Xander, the results were woefully insufficient.

Instead, with every new wave and variant the ants sent, Landor only seemed to be acquiring resources to improve its own defense.

Let’s take the tanks for example. The ants continued to send forth a few of those with each wave, and they always died before they could get close. Not because they were weak, but because they were too dangerous to be left alone to roam freely.

But when they did die, their remains were sent to Landor to be processed. The result? Well, using the magical equivalent of duct tape, Landor’s engineers managed to fashion their powerful chittin and that organ that could spew out napalm-like flames into something resembling a fire turret.

These were manned by some of the newly recovered soldiers and placed near the frontlines to assist the elite team and help cover their bases.

Xander honestly felt like he was watching a real time strategy game where every battle earned them coins and monster parts, and they used both to create more powerful defenses, which allowed them to kill even more ants to get even more powerful defenses. It was an interesting feedback loop.

But despite things looking like they were going Landor’s way on the surface, everyone who was allowed to learn the relevant information was keenly aware of the fact that they were actually walking on a very thin line.

Xander hadn’t even attempted to count the number of ants they had killed since this whole thing started. But according to Aubrey, it wasn’t even fit to be called a drop of water in a bucket. However, they had succeeded in doing one thing, and that was making their dwindling food reserves even more scarce.

By the way, Aubrey had indeed managed to figure out how to observe one of the main chambers without being spotted. She essentially copied the original blueprint for the telepathic network and overlayed it on the original, allowing her to see what was passing through without being discovered, and from there, she realized that the ants were starting to get pressured.

The food shortage was becoming an actual issue, and acts of cannibalism were rapidly increasing as the colony struggled to sustain itself. The group suspected that if things continued like this, it wouldn’t be long before the queens stopped hesitating and just decided to throws its immense numbers at Landor. If that happened, they had no choice but to get overrun or retreat.

If there was some solace, most of Landor’s citizens had safely evacuated towards the next city where Xander’s group had originally arrived in. Only a few of the elderly stubbornly chose to stay in Landor, as to them, they were already old. So whether they died or not had no consequence. Instead, they just wanted to see how things ended.

Hence, it was mostly just soldiers and military personnel who remained at Landor.

Which brings us to our current place in time.

’The payload is about to reach its target.’ Aubrey’s calm voice responded in Xander’s ears.

He didn’t react as he calmly sharpened his sword on a whetstone fashioned from the chittin of one of the tanks, keeping the sharpness of his swords up one by one.

Meanwhile, in the catacombs.

Injured ants were being ushered back to the main chamber, surrounded by healthy soldiers and workers.

Recently, the colony had decided that healing soldiers who were injured to a certain extent wasn’t worth it. As such, any injured ant that returned from battle would be among the ones to be eaten by its brethren.

Many of them had injuries like severed limbs, heavily damaged armor, and internal bleeding. Injuries that would take too long to heal and would render them largely useless in the upcoming battles, so the queens made an executive decision.

As they arrived in the impossibly large chamber filled with countless ants and the massive, heavily pregnant figure of the queen, the injured ants were taken to a large pool of green goop. Some ants were already entering, and when they did, they were silently melted down without a sound. When this happened, a new caste of specialized workers would extract the end product and carry it to the queen to feed her, while the rest only got scraps.

This pool was next to the dwindling mass of behemoth flesh which had largely lost its remnant energy, hence, it was much smaller than before. Moreover, many of the ants which had been flying around were now silently resting on the walls, wings folded as they conserved energy. So the loudest sound in the chamber was the disconcerting birthing noises of the queen.

As these latest batch of ants lined up to be melted down, the queen, which had been focusing on eating and manipulating the life inside of it suddenly paused and looked up. It seemed to sense something peering directly at it through the telepathic link, drawing its attention.

At the same time happened, the next batch of ants entered the pool of acid without any resistance, and their bodies began to get melted down.

Before the queen could accurately detect the presence it sensed through the telepathic link, it vanished.

Startled, it immediately isolated the telepathic channels, fearing that it was being spied on.

And that’s when its antennea, which sensed its surroundings via a mix of pheromones and a specific mana frequency, picked up something strange in the air.

It turned its large head towards the source and saw that the acid pools were releasing strange invisible fumes that began to waft throughout the chamber.

It only took it a moment to realize.

SKREEEEEEEE!

A powerful shriek erupted from its mouth, echoing through the chamber.

Then it moved its huge body with speed that did not match its frame, using it to cover the hole housing the special set of ants it had been nurturing.

At the same time, the previously inert ants flew, half of them moving to cover the queen with their bodies while the other half moved to cover the acid pool, trying to prevent the fumes from spreading further.

Outside, Aubrey, who had intentionally revealed her presence through the telepathic network to distract the queen, revealed a grin.

”Gotcha.”