Into Twilight: Chapter 17

The party made it to a partially-dug chamber about fifty feet away before the hive’s guardians found them. The first ant around the corner was maybe knee-high, skittering under Dan’s surprised sword thrust only for Emily’s greatsword to bisect it almost immediately. Then another dog-sized ant ran into the room. Dan raised an eyebrow and made eye contact with Nora, who just shrugged.

“Either we’re the monsters and fighting babies, or they have a worker caste,” Nora stated as she unleashed an arrow into the tiny ant, killing it instantly. “My current bet is that it’s a worker. It doesn’t make sense for all the ants to be gigantic and have jaws that can shear through a tree trunk. Some of them have to be smaller.”

Before Dan could reply, a swarm of the dog-sized ants poured into the room. Dan lunged forward and skewered one with his sword, it’s much thinner chitin barely slowing the piercing point of the weapon. He withdrew the blade and kicked away another ant that drew too close to him before bringing his sword down on it. This time, the slashing edge of the sword slammed into the thorax of the ant with much less effect. It still cracked the rather adorable chittering creature’s armor open, but the chitin slowed the blade enough that it mostly just left a gash wreathed in a web of cracks. He withdrew his weapon and stabbed downward in one quick motion, ending the ant.

Got it, use the point of the blade. The chitin was hard enough to severely dampen the effectiveness of the cutting blade, even on the smaller ants. At the entryway, Emily and Andrea were clearing the small ants back with wide strokes from their weapons while Nora picked off the few creatures that slipped in under their guard.

Each dead ant brought another heady rush of energy as mana poured into him. At first, Dan tried to keep track of how many of the creatures he killed, but before long, the pleasant pink tingles traveling up and down his spine began to blur and merge.

They were holding the swarm back for now, it was only a matter of time before the sisters tired or a couple too many ants slipped through and the party was surrounded. The mandibles on the smaller ants were nowhere near the size of their larger cousins, but Dan had no desire to test the resiliency of his leather boots against them.

“Close your eyes in three!” Dan shouted as he stepped forward, just out of the range of the sisters’ backswings, and unleashed a Flame Jet into the oncoming ants. The first hint of emptiness hollowed within him as the mana was pulled from his body, but the flash of light elicited a satisfying cacophony of chittering from the hallway as it stunned the various insects that had become accustomed to the gloomy environment. His sword darted into the stunned and injured swarm once, then twice, each time mortally wounding an ant already wounded by the fire.

“What the hell was that?” Andrea yelled back, blinking her eyes as she staggered a step or two. She almost dropped her hammer as she put a hand over her face. Evidently, she had been staring right at the ants when the jet had gone off.

Dan strode forward and took her spot next to the door as she tried to regain her vision. His sword thrust out, punching through the chitin on another semi-blind smaller ant. In the future, they’d have to work on teamwork. Right now, his magic was only really useful to distract and disable foes, and if the rest of his team couldn’t take advantage of the openings he was producing, it would almost be better for him to stick to simple swordplay. Luckily, Emily and Nora had shielded their eyes in time, and both tore into the crowd of stunned and unprotected ants with ease.

Without warning, the stream of ants stopped. Dan was breathing a little heavily, but other than that, the previous attack hadn’t even caused him to break a sweat. After a second or three of silence, two waist-high ants stormed through the door, vice-like blunted mandibles held wide. Dan thrust at one of the two and made a sour face as his sword’s point only sunk a couple of inches into the ant. From its chattered response, it clearly wasn’t happy, but the strike was far from the instant kills he had been inflicting against their smaller brethren.

He stepped back as the wounded ant lunged at him, making room for another mid-sized insect to scurry into the room. It seemed like the previous struggle exhausted the hive’s supply of the smaller and easier-to-handle ants. Dan took note of this worrying development as he slashed his sword at the oncoming ant’s head. It didn’t even dodge as the sword struck it with all the elegance and effectiveness of a shovel, stunning the monster but doing little actual damage as its chitin turned the blow. Nearby, one of Nora’s arrows bounced off the newly-arriving ant’s armored thorax.

He cursed to himself. Emily and Andrea had the strength and crushing power to fight the annoying vermin, but Nora and him were finesse fighters. Although the chitin didn’t have the thickness or durability of plate armor, it was distressingly durable, nonetheless. What they really needed was spears or crossbows, something with enough reach to keep the clacking mandibles away and still pierce the resilient chitin. If he made it out of this mess, he’d mention his concerns to Sam. The Foundation had focused his training all too much on fighting human enemies leaving him in the weeds when struggling with more exotic foes. It all made a kind of sense he supposed, no one on Earth knew what mana infused monsters would look or act like, so no one even began to know how to train him. The peril of being a trailblazer he supposed.

The ant he was fighting shook off its surprise and skittered toward him once again. Rather than give ground, Dan stepped to the side and swung his sword at the creature’s legs which sheared off with a satisfying snap. The little beasties might be fairly heavily-armored, but at a minimum, he could take their legs off one-by-one, then cook them. It might not be quick or efficient, but he’d be damned if anything but a full-sized warrior ant did him in. Anything less just wouldn’t be dignified.

His ant hit the ground and let out another low, thrumming moan. Dan ignored it and brought his sword down in a stabbing motion, wounding it. From the corner of his eye, he saw another two of the mid-sized ants entering the room. Out of time, he grunted and fed a wisp of mana into his bracers as he stabbed downward once more. This time, the blade sunk deep into the crippled ant’s head. With one last shudder, it stopped moving, and Dan withdrew his sword just as the swell of mana hit him.

Dan’s body must have hit some sort of limit, unable to keep the energy flowing into him in check. That specific ant wasn’t anything special, just one more violent package of chitin and mandibles, but its death transformed the gentle pleasant trickle of mana into a tsunami of light and white noise.

The room grew bright and fuzzy, almost like one of the camera filters his college buddies back on Earth kept trying to get him to use. A smile split across his face as he looked down at his hand. Everything about him felt lighter, sharper. His movements became effortless, like he was a swallow flowing through the clouds, flitting from current to current. Briefly, he wondered why the littlest ants didn’t syphon mana to him, but then he realized that he didn’t care. The mid-sized ants had mana, so that was what he was going to kill.

Without really thinking, he ran up to another ant and triggered Shocking Fist as he slapped it upside the head, barely avoiding its snapping mandibles. With a flash, the electricity grounded itself through the creature’s brain, rendering it temporarily insensible. He fed mana into his bracers and used the extra strength to bring the blade down in a double-fisted overhand blow, striking the weak point in its armor where the head attached to the thorax, decapitating the creature. More mana pulsed into him, and the world became brighter.

He sighted another ant and shifted to a one-handed grip, firing a Flame Jet into its charging form. Its antenna ignited almost immediately, but the sudden burst of heat wasn’t able to do much more than blind and hurt the insect. It hardly mattered; Dan smashed the beast to the ground with his sword and planted a foot on its back before stabbing downward with the aid of his bracers. It took two stabs before the creature stopped moving. He shuddered as a lightning bolt of pleasure traveled down his spine.

His clouded eyes snapped up as he looked for another foe. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Dan knew that what he was doing was wrong. Even with the increases to his mana pool, it was a limited commodity, and it seemed like there were a whole lot of ants in the hive. He should be saving his resources, relying on good, old-fashioned stabbing wherever possible. He just couldn’t, though. The excitement and adrenaline was too much. He needed to finish the ants off as quickly as possible. Maybe it was to test himself, maybe it was to protect his friends, and maybe it was to keep chasing the euphoric thrill of the raw mana coursing into him. He didn’t really know, nor did he care.

Instead, he ducked under the guard of a full grown warrior ant and discharged a Shocking Fist into it. He didn’t know when a warrior had entered the room, but he took advantage of the moment of distraction created by partially electrocuting the insect to swing himself up onto its back. In a fugue, he dropped his sword. It was too long and unwieldy, so he let it clatter to the floor. Instead, he jabbed the point of his dagger into the spot at the back of its neck where the plates of its facial armor ended and the flexible muscles of its neck began. Wedging the blade under the armor plates, he levered them up, exposing a gap in the chitin. Beneath him, the ant began to buck in an attempt to throw him off. Dan giggled like a maniac as he put his free hand up against the crack and activated Flame Jet.

The facial armor bulged slightly from the overpressure created by the detonating gases, but the creature dropped to the floor almost immediately, its legs twitching slightly. Dan staggered towards his sword, lost in a pink-colored cloud. Every nerve in his body purred to him.

Even his usually-uncomfortable chain shirt felt like a velvet caress. Mindlessly, he picked up the sword and stabbed it into a nearby warrior. Andrea was fighting the creature and screaming at Dan. He didn’t really care. He stabbed again and again, finally finding the weak spot where the thorax and the abdomen connected and wounding it in a spray of ichor.

The ant turned on him, ignoring Andrea. Dan giggled and fired a Flame Jet straight into its face. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he acknowledged that he was almost out of mana. That didn’t matter to him, nor the newly-blinded ant. Its mandibles closed on his sword blade, ripping the weapon from his hand. He reached for his dagger, only to stare dumbly at his empty hand.

That’s right, the weapon was already melted to the other warrior. He shrugged and turned back to the ant, only for it to rush into him and knock Dan to the ground. On his back, he watched the underside of the warrior skitter past him, chased by Andrea, who shot him a dirty look. After a couple seconds of searching through the chaos, he found his sword. Dead ants littered the chamber, making it hard for both humans and their cousins to move freely. Yet, still more came.

He fired another Flame Jet into a crowd of mid-sized ants, feeling a mana deprivation headache beginning to war with the cloud of pleasure he was hiding in. He staggered over to a disoriented ant and brought his sword down on it with both hands, knocking it to the ground. He swung again and again, almost insensible as his sword skittered off the ant’s chitin. Finally, the blade found its neck, and he was rewarded with another burst of mana.

Then the pink fog consumed him entirely. He vaguely remembered laughing like a maniac as he cast more spells and swung his sword wildly. At one point, he faded back in to find himself on top of a warrior ant with an ichor-stained rock in his hands, tears streaming down his face, and its head a bloody ruin. At some point, he remembered Emily grimly running out of the hive with him slung over her shoulder as he screamed nonsense obscenities at the pursuing ants and Emily. It almost sounded like he was begging her to put him back down so he could dive back into the fray.

Dan blinked his eyes open and immediately regretted it. His mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls, and his head throbbed in agony to an invisible beat. He shivered. His entire body felt cold and weak, like he was recovering from a really bad bout of the flu. Suddenly, he leaned over and heaved, vomiting up the previous day’s dinner.

“Just another Friday morning in college,” he mumbled to himself, stopping his hand before it could wipe the puke from his face. He really only had one good outfit and he didn’t want to get bile all over its sleeve.

“Well, good morning again,” Nora interjected brightly, sending another spike of pain through Dan’s sensitive skull. “You really need to stop making a habit of passing out as part of battles. Also, if you could let us know the next time you go into some sort of insane berserk frenzy, we would really appreciate it.”

“Sorry ‘bout that.” He rolled up into a sitting position, trying to suppress another wave of nausea. They were still in a tunnel, but Andrea and Emily had started another fire. Both of them were eyeing him warily, although he couldn’t tell if that was more related to the berserk frenzy or him throwing up everywhere.

“System, display status,” he muttered, trying to gain some sort of sense of what he had gained from the battle.

God, he didn’t even remember enough to know what actually went up. It looked like Spirit and Flame Jet had gone up for sure. He’d have to check the System log once he had a minute where his head didn’t feel like it was about to erupt.

“So, Dan,” Nora stated brightly as she walked over to his hunched form. “Should I start with the good news or the bad news?”

“What?” he replied blearily, barely able to focus on her.

“The good news is that we were able to find the hive treasury on our way out,” she continued, a thousand-watt smile still glued to her face. “We have officially struck it rich! Congratulations on your first wildly-successful run as the party leader. The bad news is that those mid-sized ants were definitely the workers. That first wave you killed were actually babies, which does make you a monster and a baby-killer, per our earlier conversation.”