My body automatically jumped back, but my eyes refused to move away from Genma who was frozen in time and had white fluids leaking from his mouth; almost making a solid piece of art connecting his two positions, before and after getting hit.

{Haste has risen to lv 23}

{Poisonous acid has risen to lv 10}

[Poisonous Acids special effect: Melt unlocked]

[Melt: Melts down the body of the one affected]

And only after the noise in my head settled down did I realize that the spider was crying out in his language right across me. Half of his face had melted and his spider minions were dead. His body didn’t have a single hair on it and his soft outer skin was bubbling up from the after effect of [Poisonous acid] and [Melt].

Though everything around me had stopped moving, but he alone walked with speed fast enough to make anyone run to the loo just looking at the wind ripples he was creating.

But I was the same. He wasn’t a single step faster than me. We were finally on the same boat. The only difference left between us was his bigger size and my higher reflexes.

{Clarity has risen to lv 22}

I knew I didn’t have much time, after all, [Overloading] and [Overdrive] both were very consuming skills, alone and I was using them together. So, not wasting another second I acted on my haphazardly created plan.

I converted my antennas to sharp spears, and pointing them at his head, charged toward him like a bull.

“Mh43jh2 32g42kb4”

*Ting*

[Skill: Spider language gained.]

“Is that going to do?” I understood he said and I yelled in response.

“Bring it on!”

But ‘The piercing his head with my antennas plan’ which was doomed to fail, really failed when I saw his fang moving toward my head from the right. And seeing that it would knock me out ages before my antennas would have been able to kiss his face, I decided that I would be better for my health if I dodged it, instead of trying my luck. So I jumped past them.

“What?”

The spider was a sneaky and fast fellow, but he didn’t have reflexes like me. Therefore he failed to respond when I jumped directly over his head.

His fang passed from right below my feet, bring with them a shallow, but powerful gust of wind.

“Shit!” I mumbled to myself and reached directly over his back, which coincidently was also his blind spot.

Seeing that my enemy was too confused to take note of me dropping on his back like a bomb, I yelled out, “Take this you fucker!”

*Smack*

My spike turned legs struck right where the spike on his back was blooming and outer shell which had already taken too much damage from my acid attack cracked and broke apart.

My sharp spiky leg pierced right through and entered deep inside his back. An unusual coldness from his wet fluids drenched my leg as he cried in pain.

“GWAAA!”

He roared and his body shook. And I cried in surprise as he tried to flip over his back and press me under his weight.

“HOLY SHIT!”

My center of gravity shifted, and I strongly tried pulled my leg out of his back, in order to save my ass from getting crushed under him, but my leg got stuck in his back and I stated feeling a lot of air against my face.

{Reflex has risen to lv 19}

{Fast processing has risen to lv 14}

{Overload and overdrive have risen to lv 4}

I was able to maintain my balance standing over his back, but my future wasn’t looking good at all.

With eyes wide open and my thoughts gone to la la land, I saw the ground getting near me. Stuck between a sticky and upcoming hard place, I decided to do something horrible.

Looking at my stuck leg I mumbled, “Come on! You can do this!” and gritted my jaw.

Taking a hurried breath, I cut my leg and jumped back.

{High Pain resistance has risen to lv 3}

{Shock resistance has risen to lv 24}

The spider rolled on the ground after that and the ground quaked. He created a lot of commotion, while I fell backwards, slamming my head on the ground, which almost knocked me out. Now, with my mind almost going blank and a screeching sound stopping me from hearing anything, I tried to look to see what was going on, but my vision was too fuzzy and broken for me to get anything out of it.

Unfortunately, the pain cut [Overdrive] and [Overload] short and the world which had come to a standstill, once again had its wheels turning and slowly, it started moving once again.

The noise and smell of blood once again returned to attack my senses, and I felt some of my pain flyaway remembering that I wasn’t alone in this shit.

{High pain resistance has risen to lv 4}

I knew the war was still ongoing, but that was the end for me. I had emptied my tank fighting against the zombies and against the pain, whereas the spider was once again on his feet staring at me with his saliva leaking his mouth; probably trying to make me feel uncomfortable.

*Sigh*

“Can’t I make up with you some way or another?”

“You little piece of shit!” He spoke with swag and a huge grin showing his victory over his face.

*Spit*

He spit his toxic saliva on the ground, without breaking our eye contact and then like a true romanticist, he said, “I’ll kill you.”

And I believed him.

His body stated changing starting from his face. Two deadly and long scythes appeared with their ends pointing toward the ground, destroying his fangs in the process and a metallic sheen covered his whole body.

Three metallic claws changed his previous biological claws and his legs turned black. His eyes exploded and a reddish blue hue glowed inside the newly created fleshless holes. A pair of horns appeared from the sides of his head and a hole appeared at the center of his chest.

And as if the ground was celebrating his transformation a huge explosion occurred at the same time he finished his sentence and a shockwave cleared all the dust away.

“Let’s see who saves you know!” his voice changed to a more deadly, echoing type and he got ready to take action.

I knew there wasn’t much left in me to move, so I sighed and closed my eyes.

“I want to sleep!”

Darkness covered my vision and I waited for it to become eternal and me to become eternal with it, but that moment never arrived.

The more I waited for Mr. Juggernaut to finally take my life, the longer my hesitation grew and the nervous I grew.

And when for a whole minute I didn’t feel life leaving my body and becoming a part of the cosmos, I opened my eyes to see the king standing in front of me some distance away.

There were more than a thousand threads emerging from his body, giving the Illusion that he was trying to hold the universe and stopping the time from slipping away from his hands.

His body looked tired and haggard, as if his life world soon give in and he’ll finally free everyone from his terror, but his eyes…

His eyes were more than alive. They still retained their spark and youthfulness. Moreover, the grin on his face told an entirely different story; like he wasn’t ready to die yet. Like he still had a trump card left to use.

And I saw the glimpse of his trump card through the terrified face of Mr. Juggernaut who was getting absorbed into his chest.

‘The hell!?’ I thought, while he slowly lifted his head and looked at the commander who was flying above him, to softly say,

“You think this will kill me!”

Though he spoke slowly, a shockwave still spread through his voice and assaulted all of us. I and many others got flung backwards and eventually there stood no one in ten centimeter radius around him.

{Push resistance has risen to lv 12}

And the king started glowing in a dark purple glow.

“You think I am some who you can fight against? You think you can defeat me? Maybe you would have been able to before, but not now! Not with this new power of mine!”

“I WILL NEVER DIE UNDER YOUR HANDS AGAIN!”

And I was finally far enough from the king to see what those threads of his were connected to.

“Let’s see who saves you know.”

And right in front of me, those hundreds of thousands of threads originating from the king started pulling the objects they were connected to; the zombies. Some flew and some got dragged, but not a single one from them showed any resistance to the act.

I even felt like the zombies were smiling; like they were happy.

“It is as if it they are fulfilling their duty, their duty to… get absorbed.”

The whole ordeal was as if a video was playing in front of our eyes, but backwards.

“Is this the reason why the first worm spread her eggs everywhere?”

And then I remembered a skill that I had noticed but not given mush interest on king’s status.

“All for one.”

And all the gears finally connected, when the thought of Mr. Juggernaut becoming one with the king once again played in my mind, a horrible reality finally hit me.

“Don’t tell me…”

[Knowledge has risen to lv 5]

But the result was already in front of me. The gears had already started turning and one by one the zombies started approaching him to become one with their master.

The first some zombies that had reached him, got absorbed the moment they touched him. But that was just the start. I soon found myself seeing zombies getting pulled toward him from all the corners of the room.

I looked in horror as the king absorbed his first wave of hundred zombies and grew a centimeter taller. Which made him almost equal to ‘Mr. Brute’ in size and he was the biggest ant of our colony. The problem was that even though the soldiers and workers had killed a lot of zombies, there were still about twenty thousand zombies present in the room.

“FUCK! KILL THE ZOMBIES BEFORE or WE”LL ALL DIE!” I yelled and the captains reacted without wasting a single second by directly commanding their troops to kill the zombies.

“Kill Them, Kill them kill those fucking zombies. All of them!”

The soldiers started killing the zombies and out of some divine phenomenon not all zombies fought back. It was like they were too happy getting dragged to their deaths that they didn’t care dying some seconds sooner.

“FUCK! Faster, Faster… don’t let them return. Kill those beasts!”

“Yes sir!”

“Let’s kill them!”

“Die you bastard!”

Such shouts reverberated all over the place, but even then we failed to completely stop the flow of zombies toward the king.

Ten, fifteen, twenty…

The more zombies he absorbed, the bigger he got.

Hundred zombies, two hundred zombies…

By now he was already the size of the Mantis I once saw in the forest while running away from the bees. And he looked too menacing for me to do anything about him.

Nine hundred, one thousand…

He stood almost half as tall as the ceiling with a worm like tail dangling behind him…

*Roar*

By that wasn’t it…

The zombies kept on moving toward him and he kept on getting bigger.

Three thousand, five thousand…

He stopped absorbing zombies after reaching the five thousand mark.

While our soldiers killed two thousand of them in the ten minutes which was a greater number than they had killed through the war, but the rest became some kind of black powder the moment they reached near the king and formed a shell around him, protecting him from attacks from all around.

Ten minutes and the death of another five hundred zombies later, the atmosphere of the cavern became heavy and a sense of terror spread across.

We actually tried to destroy the shell protecting him, but even my [Wind Cannonball] failed to do anything, much less the others. The cannon ball did actually destroy the portion of the egg like shell it struck, but the shell regenerated faster than the rate it destroyed at. So it turned out to be a failure.

The king had a large shell made out of zombies covering him like an egg, and we were staring at our future with hopes and ambitions.

But all the hopes and ambitions broke the moment the shell cracked and a monster too strong for us ants to take care of emerged from behind it.

“RAWR!”

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