Natalya observed the general direction everyone was headed to before going her own way. She acted alone, but not without guarantees – she needed a path of retreat.

That is why she always stuck to Arthur’s group.

Whether it was them, Kyel’s followers or the independent forces like herself, they were the same in her eyes, so the ones with a larger amount of people won. If anything, they should be able to buy a few more seconds before meeting their end.

Arthur was headed to Terminal A-1. Since no one knew anything about the outside, it came down to personal taste – people avoided the underground levels and followed his decision to go that way. They all wore a more sophisticated version of the Ant Armor, but Natalya who went ahead of them hadn’t changed of her usual clothing and leather armor.

-Wait! Natalya! It’s dangerous to go out like that! – Arthur shouted from all the way back.

The girl paid no mind to it, she already knew what was going on outside, and there was no need for her to don that awful suit.

Entering the terminal, she found traces of dust in the passage and further ahead the remains of Seven’s handwork. She hadn’t been there before, so it didn’t look suspicious.

Except for one item.

“This is definitely...”

Natalya crouched down and recovered Seven’s hand. It had no fingers.

As soon as the crystal faced towards her, a window popped up.

||Player “Seven” has invited you to his party||

||Accept? Y/N||

||By accepting this request, party members will be momentarily visible to each other||

She creased her eyebrows.

***

5 hours prior to the invasion.

Deep into the boroughs of the destroyed city, there was no light. There was no wind, no warmth, no sound.

Only cold silence and the strong smell of rotten earth, and Seven laid there, as if buried six feet down and unable to free himself – there was no struggle, he firmly accepted the concept of death.

The thought of being an inanimate object.

To become one with the surroundings, he would need to blend in, think like the surroundings. Think of nothing at all.

There was no way for him to learn such a thing from Natalya – she didn’t need it anyway. Those who act in the shadows do so because it is not possible to act in the light of day.

He had to learn on his own, much like he did while crafting the ant armor, leaving his fingers full of holes from messing with the needles, small cuts from tearing apart the ant tissues, marks and blisters from the rough work.

Close your eyes.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Slow down.

Make it slower.

And now, you can’t breathe.

…

…

…

A ripple.

The smallest noise of a creeping creature he was already accustomed to. He opened his eyes for a moment and the thing was practically on top of him. As before, it was searching for something but, not finding anything, it ignored Seven and moved on.

It narrowly crushed his face with one of its legs, which would force him out of stealth.

A few minutes later, he got up.

Seven took a head-sized leather bag that was filled to the brim with a white, fragrant substance. The smell didn’t travel far, but it was potent.

It bugged him ever since encountering that lone ant the first time. The ants were searching for something, but what?

Maybe this was the answer, but he had no idea what it was. His first assumption was food.

“Just why were they looking for this...?”

He quickly left the place and headed to the ant colony, his objective to kill the abandoned Queen. There were significantly fewer worker ants going in and out of the city, he had no trouble passing through there.

He creased his eyebrows as he traveled through the deserted landscape. Not only there were not many bodies left to take, but there was also no more river of blood, either.

The gears started working for his brain.

“Now that I remember, the ants didn’t get any closer to the blood river earlier...”

He approached the large space and it was still moist with the red liquid. He picked one of the fingers from his pouch and smeared it with the earth down there. He waited for a while and nothing happened. Seven repeated the process by directly throwing the leftover fingers in the ditch at several points.

Still, nothing happened.

“Okay, this might be fine...”

He climbed down and started to walk in the ditch, facing the direction of the colony.

Although it looked like the same place he saw from above, the actual feeling of walking in a field literally soaked in blood was something else.

How many people died to create something that big? Even if it was mostly water, a significant amount of dead bodies was needed to turn it like that. Were there humans living in that world before they even came in, or were the previously kidnapped people used as fodder to feed its growth?

“The answer lies inside the Queen Ant...”

The crystals should be pretty much impossible to destroy by the small tidbits of information he had from chatting with Ai, if it digested that many then it would be something else. At the very least, they should be discarded somewhere.

“What about the bones?”

There was none in sight, and from the shape of the terrain they would be deposited around the middle, mostly.

“The Queen eats people whole, she’s not picky. Other ants don’t seem to care, either”

Seven understood that the river was not a disposal site, nor was it simply for the sake of eliciting a reaction – if that was the case, why did it disappear before the established time?

It was deliberately created.

Reaching the end of the road, Seven noticed there was a wall. Its composition was unnatural if compared to the soil around there.

“It should take a few hours to completely drain this river if there was a leak, and I would’ve smelled the blood from the other side, somewhere around here...”

It was very dark on that side, he could barely see anything.

“There’s a sound coming from somewhere, I think I’ve heard it before...”

He stopped at a place and focused on identifying it, it was familiar but a bit distant, he guessed an ant.

“If the colony is on the other side of the wall, they must have built it to prevent the river from flooding in”

That was all the information he could gather from there. He went back and made his way towards the Queen Ant, around that time the invasion was issued.

||Player “Natalya Wolskev” has accepted your Party request||

“Hmm...”

Seven didn’t know which Terminal Natalya would come towards, but he understood her reasons for always hanging around Arthur. Her choice would follow his.

Whether it was simply because the terminal index was attractive, or because the first terminal was a logical starting place when scouting, Seven thought it was a good probability for him to go in Terminal A-1 for the mission. However, he didn’t know if Arthur had passed through other terminals, in which case there was no guarantee for him to choose Terminal A-1, as there were other options and it would come down to the one he thought was safest.

He had inquired with Ai for information about the Party selection on his way to the colony. It depended mostly on the crystal on your hand, which he left behind to prevent the entrance from closing and eliminating his materials, plus he could need an escape route in between the maintenance hours.

Exploring the party menu, there were two automatic settings which made the crystal constantly send waves: “Searching for Party” and “Looking for Members”, the difference being whether the person was in a party or not, in which case the latter one could be used to create the party.

He could at least be sure that Natalya wouldn’t be a member of any party – if she was in Terminal A-1, she would likely find it first and receive the message.

That was all just a pleasant surprise, what he wanted to know was: where is the Human System? Certainly not inside the crystal, the thing was like a display screen and from what he noticed, mostly used to mess with player interaction.

“Somewhere in our body, the Human System emits the waves that gather information and can be identified by others. The crystal is remotely controlled by the Human System and also produces waves...”

If it didn’t send waves on its own, the Party request would’ve never reached Natalya. As for where the actual Human System was located, if it existed inside them, it would be in the brain. Otherwise, all they had were emitters and the data was processed by an external source – that would also mean the waves reached farther than assumed.

Seven let out a smirk.

“How convenient...”

An exploit he could use immediately.

***

“...Impossible”

Natalya could see a small blue dot in the distance.

“Is it really him? He definitely died back then...”

A sense of urgency welled up in her chest.

Since she possessed his crystal and they were in a party, their respective locations would always be revealed. It was simply that sacrificing an arm to perform this trick wasn’t worth it, but in his situation, it could only be mentioned as making the best of what you have.

As for the fingers, she didn’t think much about them. It was nothing but rotting meat at that point.

She put the hand inside her bag and went forwards.

Natalya opened the gates, and what awaited her on the other side...

Didn’t seem to faze her.

At least a small discomfort or a trace of a reaction could’ve been expected, seeing that Seven himself, who didn’t view reality for what it was, was shocked for a brief moment. Others would immediately fall into despair, and a few would express indifference after a few seconds of consideration.

No matter how small, such reactions existed.

But there was nothing on Natalya’s face, there was no change in expression and even from a chemical level, there was no sign of any alterations in her body at seeing that hopeless instance.

She looked around the premises, scouting for possible enemies, and made her way much quicker than Seven.

Seven moved cautiously and avoided fights if possible, it was necessary to exert caution in his situation.

But not Natalya, she couldn’t see well, but even the scratch of the wind on a piece of junk was easily detected by her ears. The darkness was nothing new, if anything, it was a place she could call home – her domain.

She deliberately looked for the ants on the surroundings and in a few minutes attracted their attention, crushing each one of them without batting an eye, and even after being exposed to the rotten air and breathing that sickly cloud, there was no visible change – she was perfectly fine.

After defeating all of them, she proceeded to the tunnel while making her way to the Queen Ant’s chamber.

The place was crawling with ants, so much that it seemed impossible to pass by them without a fight.

“How did he make it that far?”

She furrowed her brows and battled them head-on. The fight this time would take much more time – she wasn’t invincible after all.

But surprisingly, it didn’t turn out that way. The ants looked sluggish and disoriented when fighting her, she knew for a fact that they did not possess good sight and their detection depended exclusively on the sense of touch and smell.

“That guy did something to them...”

As the light indicating his position got bigger and clearer, she could almost make out the figure of his body.

***

By the time Seven reached the Queen Ant’s chamber, she was much weaker than when they first met. There was no more food to eat and she barely moved, if at all.

“It’s like she’s already dead...”

He had expected that much. The true challenge of this invasion was dealing with the environmental hazards, seeing through the darkness and fighting despite the low morale, their minds too affected by the doomed city they were about to see.

Forced by the contribution system to go forwards instead of settling down and calming their nerves, they would be no different than headless chickens.

And reaching the end, even after all this, they wouldn’t know how to deal with this abomination.

Once he approached the entrance, his presence was detected by the abandoned Queen and her legs whipped madly in the air, he flinched instinctively but calmed down afterward. It couldn’t reach him and he knew that.

“It’s starving”

Seven simply stood on a spot not too close and not too far from the monster while it uselessly tried to reach for him. After making sure there was absolutely no way for it to go further than that, he moved his eyes to scan the surroundings, for both the view of that despairing human face, with her mouth dripping blood like a baby who couldn’t properly eat her meal, and the squirming legs no different from a cockroach’s movements were unnerving to look at.

On a closer look, the distinct cyan of the crystals endowed to them shone weakly from a few points, and they amounted to a reasonable amount of light once heavily stacked in a pile.

“So, they remove the crystals and put them on a pile. It can’t be digested after all. Why do they keep them, though?”

After a few more minutes, the Queen’s frantic movements had died down completely, but Seven still didn’t trust her and chose to wait.

“Either way, Natalya is still a bit far, I have time to spare”

Once he sensed Natalya quickly approaching, he took a short spear and a heavy crossbow that was attached to his back and re-checked the length of the rope attached to the spear. He didn’t know if it would be enough to penetrate the Queen’s skin, but due to it appearing a bit transparent, it was likely thin. Unlike the other ants, the Queen was surprisingly not heavily armored.

“Maybe they evolved like this because there was never a case where previous queens were directly surrounded”

He didn’t know too much about the biology of insects, so he couldn’t tell what advantage there was to evolve into such a large size.

“Time’s up”

Seven assumed his position and launched the spear onto the heavy crossbow, pulled the lever to the back and send it flying in one swift motion, but the angle was too high and it lost strength midway. There was a small movement from the Queen’s legs afterward, cutting the rope and preventing it from reaching her or for him to recover the spear.

He took the remainders of the cutoff rope and tore apart the tissues on his armor to attach it to the second and last short spear. For this mission, he had forsaken the half-moon blade and the backpack since it would occupy too much space, hence why he needed to avoid all ants in the way. It was too high of a risk for a dubious reward.

He tied down the rope and strengthened the grip with the tissues, strapping them together with tape and glue. He hadn’t found enough rubber band in the warehouse to attach on both, it was necessary to sacrifice part of his suit as there was no other suitable material.

“One last chance”

If he could find a better position, he would be able to pull it off with his legs, sadly he lacked both the knowledge and the ability. He exerted all the strength on his arm to pull back the lever, the muscles already feeling a nasty burn, but he gritted his teeth and launched it.

Shoot.

He looked expectantly at the flying spear, took the other end of the rope and ran back. The rope rapidly left him as the distance between the spear and the Queen diminished.

Finally, with a timed action, he pulled strongly at it, suffering a staggering pull that propelled him two meters towards the monster, yet the barbed side of the spear came down with full force and ripped a wide injury. That was what he aimed for, not to penetrate deeply into the Queen's body, where the spear would surely pierce some non essential organ that wouldn't end her life, he wanted the spear to slice the thin tissue and see for himself if there was watery blood inside, coming out like a fountain.

A wretched scream filled the room with the feelings of agony, anger, and desperation contaminating every pore of Seven’s body. A hard collision ensued when the human counterpart of the Queen nearly caused the collapse of the cave, leaving behind only the sound of gushing blood that quickly flooded the floor.

It didn’t die immediately, struggling to make a stand against the enemy it had yet to see, but the struggle quickly left the deceased body.

||Quest Update||

||Area 1’s Queen Ant has been slain by player “Seven”||

||Territories claimed:1||

||Contribution Ranking||

||Seven – 1st (52,08%) // 3000 points||

||Natalya Wolskev – 2nd (37,5%) // 2160 points||

||KyelPrajna – 3rd (2,95%) // 170 points||