The Unmaker

The Old District was already flooded with giant ants, and more were still streaming in through the Southern Luwu Tunnel just a hundred metres away from the shelter.

Back when Dahlia was still in Bug-Slaying School, she’d regularly frequented the library on tomes about ants—they were by far some of the more ‘accessible’ insects she could find parts of being sold in the Bazaar, and their chitin usually sold for cheap in bulk, meaning most Swarmsteel she’d made in the past two years were composed of around sixty percent ant chitin and forty percent whatever else she was naming the actual Swarmsteel after. Ant chitin were much like the foundations of a building to her; they wouldn’t ever stand out as the selling point in the construction of a particular Swarmsteel, but a Swarmsteel couldn’t be held together without them, either.

Under more relaxing and normal circumstances, seeing a small line of ants underfoot she could harvest for parts would be a dream come true for her coffers, but right now, they were a sea of writhing red.

Swarming the two-storey shelter and New District Streets below, hundreds and thousands of drone ants crawled everywhere, town-rumbling vibrations running amok. Each and every single one of them were as tall as she was, the vacant red glow in their eyes giving away their voracious intentions—of the sea of ants, a hundred or so were gnawing away at the robust shelter, their mandibles screeching and scratching against the hard stone surface. Three hundred chopped down the buildings on her left, three hundred more caved in the ones on her right, and the remaining formed an ebbing and flowing river transporting the raw materials harvested from the buildings back to the Southern Luwu Tunnel. There had to be more inside the tunnel, but there was just no telling how many they were actually up against.

“... Shit,” Amula hissed, scowling fiercely as she peeked over the chimney, making eye contact with a single ant before immediately ducking back under cover. “When was it that we last heard the lightnin’ hornet screech last night? Around two past midnight? Or three past midnight?”

Dahlia gulped, nodding slowly. “At least twelve hours, I… think. That means the shelter has probably been under siege for that long already.”

“And the giant bugs that were already here in the New District to begin with? Where the hell are they?”

“Eaten by the ants that crawled in through the tunnel… probably.”

Amula cursed and stole a second peek down at the shelter, through one of the barred windows where they could still see the survivors’ silhouettes moving inside. “At least the shelter’s still standin’. If Issam and the twins made it back with their vegetables, there should be enough supplies left inside that everyone can stave off hunger for around a week or so… but these ants won’t leave until they’ve broken in, huh? In that case, the two of us on the outside will have to–”

“The thirty of us on the outside will have to find a way to distract them, yes.”

Dahlia’s bristles didn’t tingle. Amula didn’t hear the voice until it was right behind them. They whirled at the same time to see two mantis scythes flying over the edge of the building as Issam pulled himself up, smiling at them softly before pulling the rest of his party onto the roof—and they were all children, none older than thirteen, every last one of them in various states of fatigue and hunger. Dahlia’s breath caught as she watched them waddle onto the roof one by one, taking their positions behind crates and chimneys and pallet stacks; had there not been enough food in the shelter for everyone to fill their stomachs after all?

The twins leapt onto the roof a second later, the last of the children to arrive, and the first thing they did was throw themselves at her for a tight, neck-breaking hug. She gasped and tapped their backs, trying to get them to let go. Issam nodded at Amula with a grimace, his expression darkening as he noticed the senior’s bandaged boot and the bloody scar over her left eye.

“... Where’s Doctor Sanyon and Jerie?” he asked, as his mantis scythes pried the twins off her and he leaned in for a hug as well, breathing a shuddering sigh of relief. Her breath caught and she didn’t hug him back immediately. “I figured something would happen along the way that you’d have to stay a night outside, but the ants streamed in from the Luwu Tunnel like a winter flood. Thank the Great Makers that you’re still-”

“Not now,” Amula snapped, pulling him away by his capelets as she scanned the thirty or so children surrounding them; Dahlia finally took notice of the bug-slaying shawl draped across their torsos. “Jerie’s gonna be here in about ten minutes since we left him behind to rush back here, but what’s up with them? Ye brought the first to fourth years up with you? Without their Swarmsteel? The hell are ye thinkin’? Also, how did ye–”

“We were already planning on making a move to deal with the ants, but then Ayla spotted the two of you through the windows, so we decided to group with you first,” Aylee said, as she lay sprawled on her stomach with her hands cupped in circles around her eyes, observing the line of ants running back and forth from the Luwu Tunnel in the distance. “We’re not much older than most of them, by the way. It’s not like we’re graduates ourselves. We’re barely qualified to lead them as is.”

“More importantly, we trust you two to lead us, Senior Issam and Senior Amula,” one of the younger students said, a sharpened metal pipe clenched tightly in his hands as he nodded at the five of them. “We’re not fifth-years, and some of us have never picked or trained with any specific Swarmsteel, so we probably won’t be able to do much damage to those bugs, but… Senior Issam told us there’s a strategist up here who’d be able to lead us to victory. Senior ‘Dahlia’, was it?”

Dahlia raised her head meekly. “Right. Um. That’s… me.”

The younger students looked her up and down, a wall of suspicious gazes, and she immediately wilted behind Amula as she frowned at Issam.

“Why’d you… tell them about me?” she whispered to Issam, who craned his head back to listen. “I’m not a strategist. False. I don’t… I don’t know how to deal with this. What am I supposed to–”

“But you do know how to deal with this, don’t you?” he said, blinking pointedly as he did. “As things stand, none of us even know what ant species we’re dealing with. Fighting them head-on is not an option, so our only way out is to make them leave or wander off on their own volition—in that sense, you’ve probably already identified their species, haven’t you?”

…

She clutched her arms and stared nervously down at the sea of ants, noting the generic club-shaped heads and the reddish-black chitin—nobody would fault her if she said there was just no way anyone could identify an ant species simply by looking at them, but luck would have it that Alshifa had always been plagued by small dens of this particular ant species.

Most people wouldn’t pay much attention to them, but her mom had always made sure to point them out whenever she came across them in the Old District. They were nesting ants with one of the most painful stings in the world, equipped with massive, forcep-like mandibles specifically evolved to deliver their pain no matter the toughness of their target’s carapace. Their mandibles, after all, were some of the sharpest and sturdiest pins anyone could use for Swarmsteel.

Maybe she wouldn’t be exactly right on the mark, but–

“They’re bullet ants,” she whispered, as Eria nodded on her shoulder to confirm her guess. “What their exact species is… isn’t important. Individual ants aren’t generally tough to deal with. It’s dealing with the strengths and behaviour of the entire giant ant swarm that’s difficult, and on that end… there is a way to easily dismantle their organisation.

“Bullet ants don’t rear backup queens in case of an emergency.

“That means, if the queen dies, the rest of the bullet ants will either slowly die off themselves, or they will leave in search of a new colony to merge with.

“Either way, if we can kill the queen, we’ll… win.”

She could hear some of the younger students whispering amongst themselves, doubting the legitimacy of her claims, but Issam didn’t even hesitate a beat before reaching for his sword.

“And you’re sure if we kill the queen, the rest of them will just leave this area?” he asked.

“... Maybe,” she mumbled, peering at the swarm beneath her. “At the end of the day, they’re giant bullet ants. Maybe they don’t behave like small bullet ants. I could be… wrong. Uncertainty. So maybe my plan isn’t… the best–”

“Well, it’s still better than our initial plan of just whittling them down one by one in a battle of attrition!” Ayla said, clapping her hands and smiling fiercely at the younger students in the same motion; everyone tightened their jaws and trained their eyes on her. “The shelter won’t just collapse under their weight, but the longer we wait and the more ants that pour into Alshifa, the harder it’ll be to get them out! Therefore! We’ll look for the queen and kill it, simple as that!”

It was evident the younger students trusted Ayla and Aylee as well, because at once their expressions lightened with the brief flickers of hope in their eyes—though they were without any Swarmsteel, the simple fact that the strongest fifth-years were leading the charge was enough for them to put their faith in her shoddily drawn plan.

But maybe they shouldn’t.

And as her eyes darted around the sea of ants beneath her, she felt more and more uncertainty flaring inside her; she had to answer for it the moment Issam and Amula turned to her for more details.

“So?” Amula said, crossing her arms and stretching her legs as she prepared to move on command. “What’s the queen’s distinct physical traits? Can’t say I was a good study in school, but I do recall Biem sayin’ ant queens are generally three to four times the size of their grunt and drone counterparts. We’re lookin’ for a giant giant ant, right?”

“We’ve been watching them from behind the windows for a while, though, and we haven’t noticed anything of the sort,” Issam muttered, unsheathing his blade and sharpening his mantis scythes on each other; the twins and the younger students, just as well, tensed their shoulders and cracked their necks, getting rid of all the tension in their bodies. “Could it be hiding somewhere, then? Inside a building or something? Or could it be in the Luwu Tunnel itself, far away from the rest of its colony? If we can pinpoint its exact location, we can hit it hard and fast all at once before–”

“That’s… um, the problem.”

Everyone’s heads shot up to glare directly at her, though instead of reacting this time she merely kept on chewing her lips, her eyes sweeping left and right across the endless sea of ants—and then she managed to muster the courage to look everyone in their faces, gulping aloud.

“Bullet ant queens… are about the same size as the normal grunts and workers.

“So we’re probably already looking at it.

“We just don’t know… which one it is.”