The Unmaker

“Bullet ant queens… are about the same size as the normal grunts and workers,” Dahlia said, gulping aloud. “So we’re probably already looking at it. We just… don’t know which one it is.”

Amula’s head shot down to glare at her, as though to say ‘what the hell do ye mean they’re about the same size’, but they were a group numbering over thirty strong—not all of them were perfectly hidden behind cover, not all of them had the self-control to speak in hushed and controlled manners. It happened in an instant; a pair of reddish-black mandibles shot over the edge and cleaved one of the younger students in half, the ten year-old girl barely making a sound as her upper torso fell backwards into the sea of ants.

… They’re fast!

Scatter!

Then the rest of the bullet ants lunged for them, twenty or so rising over the edge all at once and snapping at their feet. Those who could jump, did. Those four younger students who’d been staring at their fallen classmate in shock didn’t manage to get out of the way quick enough; the ants crushed them in an instant, the sudden arrival of their attackers making the entire building collapse in on itself. Dahlia would’ve died, too, had Ayla not clinched her under an elbow and leapt away, all of them scattering across completely different roofs without any form of established communication between them.

It was every student for themselves.

“... Okay! But there has to be a way for you to identify the queen, right?” Ayla shouted, jerking back with a quick half-step as a group of giant ants climbed onto their roof as well, snapping at their heads. “You’re smart! I know you are! Think, figure something out, and we’ll buy you time until you come up with a plan! Everyone who’s listening–”

“Unfurling blossom formation!” Issam roared, from the roof adjacent to theirs, and everyone snapped their heads to look at him. “Retreat and lead as many ants as you can away from the shelter! Once Dahlia locates the queen and I give the signal, we’ll all descend and take her out at once!”

And, in unison, it was no longer every student for themselves. Years of bug-slaying training kicked in. Those who were adept at jumping out of sticky situations grouped up with those who were strong enough to bat oversized mandibles away, teams of two evenly spread out along the wide circle of roofs with the shelter in the centre. Amula grouped with Jerie, Aylee with a younger student with a giant club for a weapon, Ayla carried Dahlia under her elbow like a sack of grains—buildings shattered and caved like glass as the giant ants pursued, but all of them knew the retreating formation by heart. Their Instructors had beat it into them. They backed away continuously from the shelter, expanding the wide circle, slowly dragging the ant swarm out and reducing their density near the shelter.

Ayla herself jumped in zigzags, keeping light on her toes and evading only at the last second whenever a giant ant was about to snap off her head. Some of the other teams weren’t faring so well, though; screams rang from sections of their circle formation as the youngest students failed to leap onto different roofs while carrying their partner on their shoulders. Dahlia clenched her jaw and winced away, not wanting to see them hacked to pieces as they plummeted into flooded streets below. There was no room for error for anyone.

Worriedly, she cast a few glances over to Amula and Jerie to see how they were faring. In hindsight she should’ve known they were probably the last team she had to concern herself over, but… eventually they’d run out of roofs to retreat to, and some of them would back themselves towards the lightning hornet in the Bazaar.

At a rate of retreating across two roofs a minute, Ayla and herself would enter the lightning hornet’s range within five minutes.

… Think!

Bullet ants!

What makes their queen distinct from the normal grunts and drones?

[If we are speaking strictly in terms of anatomical and physiological differences, there are a few traits you can look out for,] Eria said, putting up a calm front to get her to calm down as well. [Though the queen may not differ much in size compared to her normal workers, her gaster section—that is, her abdominal region—would tend to be more voluminous in order to house their ovaries. She should also be in alate form as of right now, meaning if you look very closely, you would be able to spot wings on her back–]

She bit her tongue, shaking her head furiously as though trying to fling Eria off her nose.

I can’t see tiny details like that while Ayla’s jumping around! And there’s so many of them, just… just crawling over each other! I can’t look for physiological traits!

How would the queen behave differently?

[Normally, she would exhibit lower activity levels compared to her normal workers because of her birthing role in the colony, but you are correct in that it would be impossible for you pick out a slower-moving ant out of thousands of ants here,] Eria said, dipping her head slowly in agreement. [Other behavioural differences include emitting queen-specific pheromones to communicate with her workers, but you are incapable of smelling them, so this is not a viable observation method. She would also typically order her workers to carry her brood splinters away from her to establish remote colonies, but, again, unless your eyes are keen enough to spot a line of workers straying off in unusual directions, this is not a viable observation method either.]

What else? Is there anything that I can actually observe?

Eria grimaced, and her shoulders trembled when she heard more human screams coming from her right. Not from Issam and Amula’s direction. [It will take me some time to parse through the few bits of information I have on bullet ants. Their queens are not particularly well-researched and documented.]

Just keep working through all my options! And tell me all of them even if they sound bad to you! Maybe there’s something I’ll notice that you couldn’t!

[Understood.]

As Eria rattled all the non-viable options off in her ear, Ayla jumped backwards two more times, three more times—eventually she saw Jerie sprinting along the street below and running straight into a screeching tidal wave of ants. She lost track of what Eria was saying for a second as she screamed at him, telling him to get up on high ground, but his flute was already unsheathed and his fingers already flying over the tone holes; he stood his ground and blew out an invisible wall that the ants at the very front slammed into. It wasn’t a permanent wall, of course. He took careful steps back as he kept playing, the ants kept slowly advancing… and Dahlia tilted her head down at the ants, brows furrowing.

Something clicked inside her head.

[If she is not moving at low intensity, the queen would typically be surrounded and protected by her soldiers, but that again is difficult to observe in the current situation. There may be small coloration variations between her and the normal workers as well, but we cannot count on being able to pick that out amidst the swarm. You could also attempt to follow trails of excessive hair grooming due to the amount of attention she gets from her workers, but–]

The queen wouldn’t happen to be a Mutant, would she?

A pause. Aylee swooped down, grabbed Jerie, and jumped away with two people on her shoulders before the wave of ants could get to him.

[No,] Eria said, picking its words carefully. [There are seven ranks of giant insects, and while it is certainly a higher-ranking bug compared to the rest of its brood, it is definitely not a Mutant–]

Still, I don’t have to think about the queen from the perspective of a normal, low-ranking bullet ant, right?

Another pause. By the time Eria finished reading her mind and assessing the viability of her strategy, Issam, Jerie, and the fighter students had already slaughtered another wave of ants, moving further and further away from the shelter.

[I see.]

[So you see the reasonable path forward.]

[But in the case she does not behave the way you think she will, you will be stuck in–]

I have quiet wings, do I not?

Eria’s black compound eyes stared at her from the bridge of her nose, its gaze indecipherable. This was one of many times in the past three days she’d wished she could read its mind the same way it could read hers, but right now, what she wanted from it wasn’t knowledge or assurance that her plan would work.

She just wanted a simple ‘good luck’ from the little black bug.

[... You do, indeed.]

[Now go.]

[I shall assist you if necessary.]

And that was all she needed to hear.

As Ayla was about to make the jump back to another roof, she tapped the elbow holding her and craned her head up, nodding at the short-haired sister.

“Put me down next to that ant carcass by Issam’s street, then tell everyone to look at me for the signal!” she said, as she started kicking her legs and wriggling her arms to warm herself up. “I’ll be fine! I have a plan! Solid! Just… just trust me and let me go!”

Understandably so, Ayla looked a little hesitant just leaving her in the middle of the street where she could easily be run over by a hundred giant ants, but on the next jump she was dropped off with a resolute nod sent her way.

Then Ayla disappeared, blurring back up to the roofs while several students already took notice of her being left behind. Issam and Amula, in particular, stopped jumping altogether as they started shouting at Ayla, getting into a raucous fight over what she was planning on doing—so to all of their confusion and befuddlement, she simply raised both her arms, twirling her right hand anti-clockwise with two fingers pressed together.

In her left hand, she turned the dial on her pocket watch and made sure everybody could see the second hand ticking.

… Tick, tock.

Slipping her pocket watch back onto her waistband, she slipped her chisel out from her sleeve and dashed forward, slapping her palms onto the giant ant carcass. The ant was much bigger up close, at least thrice her size with sunlight glinting off its reddish-brown chitin. She already had her work cut out for her, though—Issam had decapitated it before Amula jumped him away, which meant the silver thread didn’t lead her to start with its missing head.

Eria! Where do I–

[Plunge your hand through its head and rip out its brain, heart, and midgut—just the digestive tract! Leave the mandible glands and stomach intact!]

If it were her from three days ago, she would’ve already hurled her guts out several times over just thinking about touching the dead ant, but now she managed by gritting her teeth so hard she felt she was going to crack something—putting her chisel away, she punched her entire left arm through the bloody stump in its thorax and clawed through its gel-like flesh, vile black pus squirting out in the most grotesque display it could perform. She didn’t lean away. She half-squinted and tore out what felt like its brain, then its heart, then a long and bulky set of entrails that she needed both hands to properly yank out.

Her nose twitched from its foul fumes, but there were only twenty seconds left and a whole body of excess soft tissue to get rid of, still. There was no way she could scrape out all of them in time. Her dad would scold her to exercise great hygiene—to first clean the ant’s chitin with alcohol before sanitising its cavity with a myriad of herbal detergents—but her mom wouldn’t bother with hygiene at all before ripping its entire body apart, cloaking herself with only its scattered scraps. She wasn’t either one of her parents. She didn’t have the surgical precision of her dad, she didn’t have the brutal heavy-handedness of her mom.

Meeting them halfway and taking both options was the best she could do.

Pinching her nose, she grabbed the ant’s drooped antennae and swung herself into the hollow thorax feet-first, kicking as much soft tissue into its abdomen before beginning to squirm the rest of her body inside. It was a far tighter squeeze than she ever would’ve thought, and she was always the one everyone teased for looking like an actual child at her age. Chitin scraped her skin as she wriggled in, and she just barely managed to slip the bundle off her back before she lay flat on her stomach, her head sticking out where the ant’s head would usually be.

… Couldn’t she squirm in just a little bit more so she’d look less ridiculous?

She tried, pushing herself in just that little bit further, and then–

Ding!

The swarm of ants rushed over her, the hard chitin exoskeleton over her body the only thing separating her from the hundreds of stomping giant legs. Immediately, the carcass started wobbling, shaking like mad, but… she was holding her stomach. She was getting flung around, tossed from left to right, but through the unrestrained swarm of ants crawling over her outside, she could see the pinpricks of sunlight still filtering through—so all she had to do now was wait, and untie the bundle in her hands to start reassembling.

All the while, she could hear Issam and the others shouting faintly from the sky, now retreating in the completely opposite direction according to her instruction. Instead of fanning out in a wide circle to draw the ants away from the shelter, they were dashing back inwards and rotating in formation to condense all the ants in a small area; the centre of this area, of course, was going to be her. She was the one who’d made the hand signal for the ‘Wilting Blossom’ formation, after all.

Now, if Issam and the younger students could converge on her location within another minute, they’d find themselves in a horribly distressing situation surrounded in every conceivable direction by giant ants… but she had to take this bet.

Her plan had to work, so now she focused purely on reassembling the broken weapon she’d been keeping wrapped up in the bundle.

…

Burning heat. Suffocation. Foul-smelling guts and spiky chitin crushing her body from every direction. Her legs were bent, her elbows were crooked, just seeing five inches before her eye was a tremendously difficult task, but she’d watched her dad make this Swarmsteel in front of her for months upon months on end—if there was one Swarmsteel in the world she was confident she could make blindfolded, it’d be this one meant to save lives, meant to cut gently and disassemble softly.

She wouldn’t be using it to save lives today.

“... Dahlia! You in there?” Issam shouted, his voice muffled as what sounded like the pommel of a blade pounded against the chitin on her left; she finished reassembling her weapon just in time and perked her ears, raising her head ever so slightly to peek out the small hole she’d crawled in from. “What’s the next move? What are we here for? They’ve surrounded us completely! If we don’t get you out of here right now they’ll close off all our escape routes, and then we can’t retreat anymore–”

“Jerie!” she screamed, her voice cracking, crawling out of the thorax with only half of her weapon attached over her left hand. “The flute! Play! As loud as you can! Make the swarm scream!”

“...”

For a second, there wasn’t any response from anyone around her. Even as she crawled out of the thorax covered in blood, guts, and slick oil-like ooze, the twenty or so students around her were frozen in fear as they stared down the swarm of a thousand ants skittering around them—but then it was the ants turn to screech to a complete halt, floundering, disoriented, tripping over the disruptive screech coming from Jerie’s cicada flute.

Naturally, all of the bug-slaying students standing next to him had their eardrums blown out as well, wincing sharply. Dahlia was no different, and she was the only one who’d been prepared for it.

… Even still.

Her eyes were peeled wide open.

She stared, whirling in place, scanning the reeling swarm for the single ant that didn’t react as violently to Jerie’s song as the others did—and several metres right in front of her, leading the charge with its wings so tightly folded over its back they were barely visible, was the completely disinterested and unaffected queen she’d been looking for.

[... How fortuitous.]

[Because it is stronger than the rest of its brood, the queen is not affected by Jerie’s song, and that makes it stand out.]

The effects of Jerie’s song lasted for only a second. The ants started moving, adapting, realising mere sounds couldn’t break their brains, but in that one second while Issam and Amula and the twins were still recovering from having their eardrums pierced–

She followed the steel thread, leapt at her target, and a dying screech tore across the sky as she rammed her dad’s Swarmsteel claws through the underside of the ant queen’s head.

In the same motion, she ripped its head off in a violent motion that sent blood splatters flying back into her face.

…

It happened like magic.

The thousand ants began to panic, scurrying back and away from her as she held their queen’s skewered head up into the air, her breaths haggard and her tongue dripping with blood and sweat. Foreign blood. Blood of their kind. They could’ve most definitely come at her, still, and they would most definitely win in an all-out battle—but with ants that relied on their queen to maintain order, losing said queen was akin to having their living, beating hearts ripped out their thoraxes.

They moved like an earthquake, rumbling the undertown with their giant legs, but between them and the girl who’d slain their queen right in front of their eyes, there was a clear hierarchy they knew better than to trifle with. They turned and scurried in the direction of the Southern Luwu Tunnel; swarming past Issam and the others in the centre of the street without touching a hair on their bodies.

Within five minutes, the last of the ants disappeared into the tunnel, and now there was no sound in the Southern New District.

Dahlia crumbled, falling back on the ant queen’s carcass.

… Are we safe for now?

In response, Eria looked far behind her in the direction of the Night Bazaar—nodding very, very slowly.

[For now.]

[But the lightning hornet is still alive, and it can still birth an entire army's worth of insects.]

[Therefore, by midnight, the lightning hornet must fall.]

[If not, Alshifa will.]