Re:Ant Lord-Chapter 110: Bloody Scythe

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Emerald hell-light swirled inside the Leopard King’s throat, reflected in a thousand shards of broken quartz. Dune tops glowed sickly green; every ant warrior froze beneath that rising pulse of doom.

Kai tensed in the sand-trench, rear foot corkscrewed for maximum recoil, one arm flung out to warn the nearest haulers. Beneath the plates of his chest he felt the Ruler-Roar stigma throb like a caged sun. Three charges. Each one an extinction flare. "If that beam cuts through the corpse train," he thought, "half the Legion dies and the Queen’s prize is ash."

"I must use the Ruler’s Roar. There’s no choice left."

He sucked a breath, mandibles stretching wide to shape the activation cry...

...and never finished.

Something struck from behind with the weight of a falling tower. The sand under his feet flash-fused to green glass, splintering up his shins. Pain punched the breath out of his thorax. Before he could register the angle of attack, a blur of crimson chitin and saw-edged limbs smashed him sideways.

Slam!

His spear, a custom seven-foot shaft of star-iron and bone, pinwheeled through heat-shimmered air, end-for-end, until one hooked scythe casually snatched its mid-spin snapping the weapon like dry reed.

Crack!

Wind, plan, and half the world fled Kai’s chest. He skipped across the slope of a dune like a stone across water, one, two, three brutal impacts before ploughing head-long into the far face. Tonnes of sand burying him up to the thorax.

Above, the Night-Leopard King’s throat finally detonated. A scything ribbon of ionised emerald burned across the dark, searing a ten-meter trough through drifting grit. The beam clipped wagon-eight’s bronze spine, but General Irontide was faster. The eight-star ant met it with crossed gauntlets, aura flaring twin suns. Emerald fire refracted harmlessly skyward; dunes hissed into glass.

Kai spat blood-flecked grit, vision swirling sand-dust and auric after-image. Then he saw what had blindsided him.

It loomed twice his height, right feet tall. A nightmare mantis carved from ruby ore, its carapace segmented, serrated along every seam. Six arm-blades fanned like a murder lotus around a narrow wasp waist. Its face was a white bone mask split by a lattice of small triangular teeth; violet ichor dripped between the slits and sizzled where it fell. Small vents at each rib blasted super-heated air, keeping sand from clotting its joints. Five-star aura roiled off its body, violent and hungry.

In one scythe-hand it pinched Kai’s ruined spear, now no more than a broken toothpick. In another it held an entire rib of someone, a slab of petrified flesh that five workers together could barely drag. The Mantira hefted it as easily as farm-ants lift a crumb.

The creature’s tail was a living chainsaw: three metres of bone plates tipped with a nest of backward barbs. That tail shot out and cinched Kai’s midsection before he could raise a limb. Hooks bit straight through his obsidian chest armour, driving needles of pain into chitin and flesh.

[Ding! System notifications: Warning! Warning!

HP: 2000 → 1620

Aura leakage detected.

Adaptive Armour: micro-fracture across sternite.]

Kai’s breath hitched. He yanked with everything he got but the tail only tightened, barbs closing like eager crocodile jaws. Any harder and he’d shear his own plates off.

With a horrible, dancer-swift pirouette, the Mantira vaulted backwards. Four of its blades jabbed into the dune behind it, cleaving glass like soap. The tail whipped, and Kai’s battered form sailed up and over the crimson monster’s head.

Mid-air, senses blurred, he still managed to twist enough to witness catastrophe. The Mantira spread all six arms, carving runes in the air, and the dune floor... opened. Sand slithered away as though sluiced down an invisible drain. A tunnel a dozen metres across blossomed, walls snapping instantly to obsidian as a super-heated wind rushed out.

The Mantira plunged, dragging stolen some corpse-meat and Kai into the churning abyss. Sand zipped shut overhead like a zipper of molten glass. Legionaries were too busy repelling hyenas to notice; dust from the Leopard King’s deflected beam hid everything in jade fog.

For Kai, sound vanished first, then all light. He plummeted into roasting darkness, tail-hooks shredding his carapace with every jolt. Miryam the egg thumped in its padded case against his flank, its empath pulse a tremor of fear.

"No... I can’t die like this. I promised her. Promised Mia..."

He tried again to rip free; the tail responded with a savage wrench. Pain drowned thought. He couldn’t free himself from the predator.

Seconds or a century for Kai later, sand gave way to hard rock. Kai struck an incline, slid, spun, finally slammed into a cluster of stalagmites. The tail uncoiled and withdrew. He lay gasping while biological alarms howled inside his ears. Everything hurts. His body parts are broken.

A flicker of bioluminescent fungus revealed a vast subterranean grotto. Sulphur pools burped lavender fire. In the centre, the Mantira already knelt at a basalt altar gnawing A’zhorath’s stolen meat, cracking the marrow and slurping.

Not one glance spared him; the predator assumed prey never escaped.

Kai’s mandibles twitched. "Good. Keep thinking I’m meat."

He triggered his skill Worker’s Resilience. His stamina surged at the cost of later fatigue.

[Aura -200. HP Regen +80 / 30 s for two minutes.]

Sharp breaths steadied. He scanned the lair. There: bone cage made of some beast rib fragments lashed by sinew. He’d be thrown there next. Beyond that, side-tunnels vented hot updrafts, possible exits or deeper hells.

First, survival. He needed a weapon. His spear halves lay thirty paces away near Mantira’s rear legs. Between them and him sprawled broken stalagmites and dry bones.

Second, he needed distraction. His hand closed on a fist-size shard of quartz. Idea sparked. freewebnøvel.com

Wind howled across the broken dunes hot and rasping like the breath of an iron furnace carrying the stink of scorched chitin and coppery blood. Where moments earlier a tidy column of a hundred corpse-wagons had crawled, now only chaos reigned: overturned sledges, tangled harness lines, and the twitching bodies of fallen worker-ants half-buried in hot boiling sand.