FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 239: Chapter 239: The Aggro King of Orrath

Just like that, Sol kept running.

He became a glowing, blazing comet of gold and silver light tearing through the perpetual twilight of the Great Orrath. He backtracked the exact path he had carved earlier that day, his transmigrator-enhanced spatial memory guiding his boots over slick, petrified roots, through dense clusters of bioluminescent fungi, and around the snapping jaws of hidden, carnivorous flora.

Behind him, the jungle was being thrashed wildly.

The horde was truly unrelenting. The sheer, apocalyptic noise of hundreds of enraged Omen-Blood beasts stampeding through the dense brush sounded like a localized tectonic collapse. Massive, skyscraper-sized purple trees groaned and splintered as the Layer 2 Great Badgers violently bulldozed their way through the trunks, too furious to pathfind around them.

Above the snapping timber, the mechanical, vibrating shrieks of the Dreadwing swarm pierced the heavy air, accompanied by the constant, terrifying hiss of errant acid melting the foliage as they frantically tried to target his blurring silhouette.

Sol’s lungs pumped like massive bellows. Even with the newly evolved, theoretically infinite physical stamina granted by his Golden Liquid, he was beginning to feel a deep, burning ache settling into his bones.

The physical exhaustion wasn’t the only issue, it was the metaphysical drain. Maintaining the violent, forced merger of the heavy Golden Liquid in his solar plexus and the ethereal Silver Liquid in his heart was taking a massive toll on his spiritual reserves. The dual-aura was burning through his essence at a terrifying rate, threatening to completely empty his tank if he kept this up for much longer.

Just a little further, Sol gritted his teeth, his jaw locked tight with concentration. Don’t drop the aggro. Keep them mad.

The sheer, unprecedented destruction unfolding behind him was all the motivation he needed to push past the burning in his chest. Every time a massive tree crashed to the earth just a few dozen yards behind his heels, or a glob of radioactive-green venom splashed against a root he had just vaulted over, he forced his legs to pump faster.

He was essentially kiting an entire high-level dungeon’s worth of mobs. It was a terrifying, exhilarating tightrope walk between absolute genius and suicidal stupidity.

And then, as he vaulted over a massive, moss-slicked log, his Crimson-Sight caught a beautifully familiar thermal signature scuttling through the underbrush ahead.

It was a single, heavily armored insect, roughly the size of a large dog. Its carapace was a rusted, blood-iron red, bristling with jagged spikes, and its massive mandibles were currently busy snapping a thick branch in half.

It was a scout. A giant ant.

Sol let out a breathless, completely unhinged laugh that bordered on hysterical. He had actually reached it.

The ant, sensing the massive, dual-essence aura bearing down on it like a freight train, turned and clicked its mandibles aggressively. But Sol didn’t even give it the time of day. He laughed again, a wild, echoing sound, and violently squeezed the very last dregs of his explosive Silver-Gold power into his calves.

With a deafening sonic BOOM that shattered the air and kicked up a massive crater of mud, Sol exponentially increased his speed. He blurred past the scout ant so fast the wind of his passage sent the heavy insect tumbling backward into the ferns.

He had successfully created a crucial fifty-yard gap between himself and the leading aerial Dreadwings.

He crashed headfirst through a final, dense wall of giant, glowing violet ferns.

Boom. The claustrophobic trees suddenly broke, revealing a massive, depressed clearing. He was back. He had successfully navigated right to the edge of the colossal crater that housed the apex ant colony.

And the colony was already ready for the grand welcome.

The sheer volume of noise echoing from the North… the localized earthquakes caused by the charging Badgers, the shrieks of the Dreadwings, and hysterical laughter of Sol… had put the entire massive hive into a state of absolute, hyper-aggressive high alert.

The crater was a shifting, undulating, horrifying sea of matte-black and rusted red. Thousands of giant, highly acidic ants were swarming the basin, boiling out of the subterranean tunnels. The continuous clicking of their massive, iron-like mandibles sounded like a deafening torrential downpour hitting a tin roof. They were in full battle formation, their antennae twitching frantically, ready to defend their territory from the approaching disaster.

Seeing the human burst from the ferns, radiating a blinding aura, the entire outer perimeter of the hive instantly swiveled toward him. Hundreds of soldier ants raised their abdomens, preparing to vomit a wave of bone-melting acid.

But before their primitive, hive-mind neural networks could even process the command to fire, Sol was already past them.

He didn’t slow down. He didn’t engage. He didn’t even draw his spear. He burned the absolute last drop of his speed boost to completely bypass the outer rim of the crater, running along the very edge of the steep drop-off.

As he blurred past a massive cluster of heavily armored soldier ants, he flashed them a bright, incredibly smug smile, raising two fingers in a mock salute.

“Thanks for the hard work, boys!” Sol yelled breathlessly, his voice echoing over the clicking mandibles.

Without waiting for a response, he dove headfirst into the dense safety of the opposite tree line. The exact second he was concealed by the thick foliage, he immediately channeled a burst of Golden Liquid into his hands and feet and scrambled thirty yards straight up the trunk of a colossal Void-Oak tree, perching himself on a thick, sturdy branch high above the ground.

He immediately severed the connection between his Golden and Silver liquids, forcefully dropping the dual-aura to avoid completely emptying his core. A wave of profound, bone-deep exhaustion washed over him, making his vision swim momentarily, but he forced himself to stay awake. He leaned heavily against the purple bark, panting for breath, and looked down through the leaves.

He was just in time for the show.

Before the primitive minds of the giant ants could even begin to pursue the strange, fast-moving biped, the real threat arrived.

The leading Layer 2 Dreadwings, flying blindly in their absolute, blood-crazed rage, violently breached the violet ferns on the opposite side of the crater. Because all their predatory focus, all their burning, insulted anger was locked entirely onto Sol’s fading essence trail, they suffered a massive, fatal lapse in spatial awareness.

They completely failed to realize that they had just aggressively invaded the airspace of another apex colony.

As for what happened next, it was brutally, gloriously predictable.

The giant ants, already on high alert and agitated by the noise, saw a swarm of massive, hostile flying insects charging aggressively into their home. They didn’t care about the small, hairless monkey that had just run past. To the ruthless logic of the hive-mind, the Dreadwings were an invading army aiming for their queen.

The crater erupted.

A literal, physical wave of black and rusted-red armor surged upward. Hundreds, maybe thousands of soldier ants launched themselves from the high branches, the petrified roots, and the edges of the crater, leaping dozens of feet into the air to intercept the diving Dreadwings.

Instantly, the clearing was transformed into an apocalyptic battle zone.