Everything seemed hazy and out of focus when I finally opened my eyes. My surroundings appeared pitch black at first and very slowly did the apparitions in my tunnel vision because focused enough for me to see that I was home again. I woke up, but with a terrible-terrible headache and a weakened susceptible body which croaked like an old man in his 90’s- forcing me to leak a mental groan. Even moving my head was unbelievably uncomfortable. My condition was bad.

‘What happened?’ I asked the question, but no one answered me. So it remained as a whisper which echoed in the emptiness of the room before fading into obscurity. And then it hit me. I remembered taking a bite out of the black apple and receiving poison damage from it. The damage was so severe that I had actually leveled my poison resistance by four levels before losing consciousness.

Damn! and then this thought came to my mind. What if I didn’t have an infinite affinity with skills? Would I have died then? It was my second struggle with death and it really struck a chord in my soul. The disappointment of being reborn as an ant was now slowly turning into anger because of how recklessly I had lived my new life as of now. Maybe this was the moment which changed how I would perceive threats against me; how I would answer the hostility pointed toward me; and what I would feel about the life that I was given.

It was at this moment when I became serious about living a life without casually gambling with it just because I was an ant, the system chimed inside my mind again and I gained another skill.

[Skill: Memory gained.]

[It is not a skill per se. Everyone has memory, but because of your affinity to skills, your memory has interestingly grown into a skill.]

[Allows you to retain memories which otherwise would have become lost in the ever growing and folding parts of your mind.]

[Lv-1/10; +.1Int./lv]

-I can’t gamble with my life anymore- a nameless ant.

It was a refreshing moment, a happy time in the crisis-filled few hours that I had lived. But even this calm which I had thought would last for a long time now -because I had found strength in being an ant- didn’t last much longer.

I suddenly felt a chill creep up over my back. It was gripping and cold. Like someone had poured a bucket of almost frozen water over my body. My legs tensed up from the sudden stimulation and my antennas started flaring as if they had found an object of concern near me. I felt a pull from them in a certain direction, the certain direction being directly in front of me.

But just as I was going to follow its direction and see what it was all about, my antennas moved again. The chill became colder and grew into a frenzy of blameless hate. My chest almost froze from the sudden panic which hit me from the back and my antennas went batshit crazy. The pull coming from the front stayed while an even stronger pull outright pulled me off the ground- dazing me.

I panicked. I hadn’t panicked this much even upon seeing my brothers being blown away by the wind. My mind was blank as a white canvas. I didn’t know what was happening, but the system chimed again during this time and I was able to understand the reason for the pulls and the chills. Yet, I still almost got lynched.

[Racial Skill: Ant sense gained.]

[Your body is not developed enough to gain the skill, but your affinity with the skills has bypassed this requirement.]

[Ant sense allows you to sense hostility around you.]

[lv-1/10; increases your degree of sense with every level.]

The poison had been so intrusive that I had completely forgotten about the existence of the mob in the room. I still didn’t understand why they were so against me. I hadn’t done any harm to them, yet they were trying to oppress me with numbers. And I was sure if I hadn’t gained the number of skills that I had, and my strength and stamina hadn’t increased from the skill acquisition, then I would have died once again.

How many times? How many times am I going to foolishly let the world decide whether I can live or not? How many times more!? Having my own kind trying to oppress me for reasons I didn’t even know felt downright wrong to me.

Do they try to oppress every new ant which is born? What right do they have to do this? I was angry. I was in rage. I had been fighting since the second I had been reborn. First, I fought against time to get out of the egg, then fought with hunger, then fought with an ant of my own kind -someone multiple times stronger than me- and then I fought to stay hooked against the winds force, then against poison, and now again. It was like the world didn’t want to accept my appearance at all, and had decided to kill me before I could do irreversible damage to the course of nature itself.

These were my own thoughts, but I was so wrong. I thought only I was being plotted against, knowing little about the kind of life which the others lived. I thought the wind was fierce and forgot all about those who had lost their footing and were abducted by it. It was this self-centeredness, the reason I lost more than I had ever hoped for? Wanted to? Who hopes or wants to lose someone? No one in their right mind thinks about their dear friends as bargaining chips on the table. It was just I. The ant that had no idea how the world worked.

The mob circling me became even more hostile when they saw me staring right at them, and so did my ability to sense them.

{Ant sense leveled up to 2}

They growled at me and I growled at them, answered their taunts with mine. They tried to push me down, make me bow, but I didn’t. I wasn’t going to let anyone dictate to me the way I should live, to who I should listen to, and how to follow. I gained skill: Taunt during his cold war. It was the skill which broke the camel’s back; and etched on my mind, not all skills are good.

[Skill: Taunt gained]

[Increases enemy hostility toward you.]

[Multiples charm with the negative multiple of the skill level.]

[Lv-1/10]

-You are so ugly, even my lizard looks better than you.

But the courage I had pieced together wasn’t able to get them to back off; instead, they started punishing me for taunting them- right as the skill had described.

They kicked and bit me; tried to shear my exoskeleton off my body. The big bulky ant I had fought against tried to catch my antennas -to pull them out- but I retaliated. They pushed me down -to stop me from moving- and I pushed them back.

{Push resistance has leveled up to 2}

{Push has leveled up to 2}

They threw stones at me. Hit me in the head. Bit me in on my stomach. Pulled my legs and jumped on me. And I received all of their attacks with my body and my health fell. My HP decreased from their continuous, rapid, and collective assaults, and decreased by .4 in the blink of an eye. I won’t say I courageously fought back. No, I was still a newborn chick after all, and the world from the eyes of an ant looks a lot different than what I was used to seeing. The ants looked dangerous adversaries in a glance; no, they looked monsters straight out of hell. Their big rugged bodies had hairs which made them look like the devil's servants, and no matter how strong I tried to convey myself as, I was simply panicked inside. And seeing my health decreased by a third of my total pool only added to my misery. A string of [-0.1 HP] filled my view, making me hasty to defend properly.

Fortunately, right when I was about to break down from the pain, the system recognized my predicament and helped me out.

[Skill: Blunt Force resistance gained.]

[Decreases the amount of blunt force damage you receive in every attack.]

[Lv-1/25; +0.5Const/lv, +0.5End/lv]

-An attack is the best defence, but sometimes, when the odds are against you, defence plays its role too: The Great Dwarf lord.

Thanks to the extra stats provided by the skill and the damage reduction to blunt attacks, I was able to somehow endure their anger. The string of number which had once filled the entirety of my view now decreased to less than half of before, but the danger didn’t just fade away because I got one skill. The skill leveled up right after I got it- projecting the horror that I was in.

But I was young and bold. When the pain decreased my mind calmed down. Seeing that I was holding against them, my confidence rose, which made me a bit reckless and I started fighting back. Thanks to the skill [Balance] which I had gotten right after my birth, the legs I kicked with didn’t make me off centred, neither did the punches I threw made me lose my balance. The skills helped me a lot during this time, teaching me their value. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to disable anyone because there were just too many of them. My skills kept on leveling up though, and before I knew it, my health was down to the last dregs, my [Blunt resistance] had leveled up to 4, [Ant sense] to 3, [Vision] to 5 and I had gained new skills: [Anger] and [Bare handed mastery].

Turned out [Ant sense] was more than just a bunch of twists and pulls bundled together to tell me about the forces hostile toward me. Because of it I was able to successfully dodge full bodied blows from the most dangerous looking ants in the room. [Vision] played a hefty role in my escape too because every time it leveled up, I was able to view my surroundings a little better than before, and maybe that little improvement was all the edge I needed to escape harm by the hairsbreadth.

Anyways, it was at this time -when I was battered and out of stamina, and had lost all hope- that the mob mysteriously dispersed, as if everything they had done until that point was just my imagination. I didn’t put any thoughts into it at that point because I was on my last breaths too, but if I had, I could have saved my colony from the disaster which was directly linked to my experience.

But I was still growing up. Heck, I was not even a day old as of yet. So, to ask me to solve deeper plots was a foolish Endeavour, and I don’t think I would have liked put my hand in that sizzling pot either.

Anyways, yes, the skills, I’ll say they were the best skills which I could have gotten during my initial days and they are my worst nightmare too; especially [Anger].

[Skill: Anger gained.][Tier-1][Automatic]

[Anger is an emotion which when released only leads to destruction. This skill is the manifestation of emotional anger. There is no controlling anger and you shouldn’t be trying to control it either. Release it and destroy the source of your misery.]

[Increases your attack power by 2%/lv]

[You will lose your control when it is active.]

[lv-1/10; -0.1Int/lv]

-Die! Die!! DIE!!!- captain of the 8th battalion,???

[Skill: Bare handed mastery gained.] [Tier-1] [Passive]

[Increases your physical damage when attacking with bare hands.

[Lv-1/10; +0.1strength/lv]

-Why do you need weapons when you have hands? - Master shrimp.

One might that think this was it, I probably left the colony right after this, but no. Right, when no one paying me any attention someone approached me. It was an ant with slim proportions. It wasn’t rugged looking like most of the other workers. Its exoskeleton was smooth and somewhat scenic. It had a slim body with its head, thorax, and the stomach at the back, all shaped like three drops of water united by the forces of cohesion between them. It had almost no hair on its body, and to tell the truth, its hairless body made it look like a polished piece of art rather than an ant.

Its looks were surprising, surely. But it surprised the heck out of me when it started talking, and fluently at that in the language of the ants.

“Are you alright?” it asked me, and I stared at it like a dead being whose soul had already left its body after all the beating it had taken from before. And I saw it panicking when I kept staring at it instead of answering back.

“I’m sorry for what you had to go through. If I knew they were going to go that far I would have called the guards on them. I’m sorry.” I could hear its voice in my head. It was unlike the voices I had heard since I was reborn. Its voice was clear as the surface of a pond and he was sincerely asking me for forgiveness; forgiveness for someone else’s mistakes. It was an amusing little creature, but I was angry. The skill [Anger] was raging in my mind and was painting my world red, but even the skill wasn’t able to get me to show my hunger to this ant. And unbelievably unlike what the [Anger]’s description had told me, I calmed down. This was how I meet my best friend; someone who had to go through rough times because of me but never once complained.

But for now we were still strangers, and I was like a wounded wolf who thought everyone around him was a hyena trying to take a bite out of him. So when he moved closer to me, I growled at it, opened my mandibles as wide as I could and threatened it with my bark- hinting it to stay away from me or I would hurt him.

“I-I hope you can let your anger go.” His shining eyes calmed me. “You won’t believe me, but what you went through… everyone goes through the same thing. They call it the initiation.” And this new information made me feel helpless.

“Unbelievable,”

“Right? But guess what, because you fought back, they are going to come after you again and again until you bow your head and accept your position.”

I snorted without thinking what the implications of it would be. But thankfully the ant I was taking too wasn’t part of the group: the mob, the beginner thugs. He was someone who was being nice to me and I was being me. We talked some more after this and before I knew it I had lowered my guard enough to let it give me suggestions and help out. My naivety was at its peak. He told me not to worry about my injuries; that eating food would take care of them; and there being a monster-sized block of protein sitting right in the centre of the room, I wasn’t worried about that part.

At least my language improved to level 2 by talking to it, and who knew charm could be a skill too which one could gain by impressing someone?

[Skill: Charm gained.]

[Improves others impression of you.]

[Lv-1/10; +0.1Charm/lv.]