‘I did notice you coming. I noticed from the very start. You weren’t even been that discreet with those constant pulses of Mana being sent out,’ the voice that seemed so familiar continued. The Core barely listed in on it, trying to figure out if something had broken inside. It was hearing a very particular voice, that being the voice of a creature that was meant to have been crushed to bits a few seconds ago. It had seen the [Queen of Hollows] die. So why was she still talking?

The Entity began to scour the immediate area, looking at the Mana surrounding the place of death. The Black Mana, originally just pushed to all sides due to the stone falling down, had begun to cluster through the material, travelling upwards in a more controlled fashion. It was moving towards a single point, a single place where it needed to be. It was not out of instinct but out of will. An intelligent mind was controlling it. The Queen was alive.

‘You seem to be a bit agitated now. Did something unexpected happen?’ The aforementioned intelligent creature questioned, mirth clear in her tone. ‘Was I meant to die with that pitiful attempt of yours? How tragic it must be to not have your way.’

The enemy was alive. But where was she hiding? Had the body seen beside the Worm not been her true form? If so, where was it? There had to be somewhere close by where she was hiding. The Core tried to find it, ignoring all thoughts about purifying the area of Black Mana. It would stay there for a minute or two while it got the job done. The other ants hadn't come in to save the Queen yet. If she could be found, the Core could crush her still. The Blackness couldn't save her. It wouldn't dare.

‘No… I do feel your pain. I have been the sore loser before if you will believe a word I say. However, I have grown beyond such limitations, allowing me to reach things that you will sadly never be able to understand. Because you still think that I can die from mere stone.’

The taunts didn’t stop, and the Core did not stop looking for the true hiding place. A hundred Mana was crammed into a ball and sent out in all directions, leaving forty meters of space open to the Entity’s eyes for a quick second. Yet every piece of Black Mana was centred around the inner sanctum. Every trace of the Queen was just above the stone.

Focusing on that place again, the Entity began to see it form. It began to see the body come out of the cloud of Black Mana, small steps at first but everything being shown after a few seconds. The Queen had somehow been reformed out of the Black Mana, had come out unscathed, and was looking extremely pleased with herself. Or… calling it based on sight was not the right word. The Core could sense that she was pleased, the waves upon waves of energy sent out riddled with that emotion of pleasure. She was happy, satisfied with the fear and lack of understanding coming from the Core. She felt superior in full force.

And then it hit the Entity. It understood, if only a small bit, why the Queen could stand above what she had been crushed by. For she was a wielder was a user of the Black Mana. She couldn't be contained in mere physical form, for that was not something one of such class should have been subject to. No… she was something else entirely, not bound by laws normally impressed on living creatures.

That was more obvious than ever, the [Queen of Hollows] finally standing among the other [Undead], her facade of being alive having changed to what her nature truly implied. While she might have had skin and organs previously, none of those had truly been important to her, for she was never in need of them.

‘You are not alive,’ the Core sent out, not sure how else to put it. That only seemed to cause more amusement from the Queen, the energy coming from her only increasing with time. She wasn't just recovering. She was powering herself up for another round of attacks, this time intending to be on the offence. The Core wouldn't allow that, taking more of the new ceiling down on the ant.

Yet that act of attack did nothing but delay it by a mere second or two, the Black Mana sprouting as tendrils from the Queen’s body and moving the stone out of the way. It might have landed on the ground next to the [Undead], but there was not a single scratch on the creature’s exoskeleton. Its happiness only increased from that. It enjoyed the Entity trying to resist, the futile attempts at stopping the inevitable bringing it massive amounts of pleasure. The Queen was nearly feeding off of it.

‘I am as alive as you but only in a different way, a better way than you will ever personally experience,’ the intelligent piece of exoskeleton said as the pair of tendrils came out of her body yet again, this time starting to dig downwards in a spectacular fashion. With all the Black Mana already saturated in the stone, it was hard to know where the tendrils were moving, forcing the Core to ignore them for now, though that didn't stop it from trying to figure out their location. ‘There had been plans for you. I was going to make you the perfect underling, taking off so many of the dull tasks from me. With a warped mind, you would have become the best servant one could have ever wished for. Now… with what acts you have done towards your would-be future mistress, I do believe that I will just kill you. Maybe after destroying your sanity, however. I have been wondering how much a piece of stone will be able to take before they break.’

The Core, not wanting any of that, tried to start figuring out just what it could do. In an attempt to stop it all from happening, it tried to use [Light-Manipulation] to deter the Black Mana from attempting any form of attack. Yet while it might have seemed useful at the start, the Mana was taken away in mere moments, the power of the Queen too much to match. The Core was too far away from its main body. Without being able to draw power to the required degree, it was doing little more than simply feeding the Black Mana.

‘Cores do not break,’ The Entity sent back in a hurried tone, quick to think about how it would survive the current encounter. Its body was perhaps far away but that didn't mean it could bear losing.

No. It could take Mana from the stone around it and use that for itself! The Entity had dismissed it before due to the chance of establishing the area but that meant nothing anymore. Destabilizing every was just what the Core needed. All the ants needed to die quickly, lest they could be used to. Starting to do just that, every single part of the line close to the Colony began to siphon in Mana as quickly as it could, the stone close by crumbling as a result.

Even without ears, both entities paused for a moment due to the rumbling starting up. It was more than just a few tons being thrown on the ground. Two hundred meters of thick stone had just been stabilised and the entire layer of surrounding material was filling in the unstabilised gaps, creating a noise much like thunder. It was unbearable and just the distraction needed to be heard.

‘You underestimate the powers I hold, little rock,’ the Queen sent out in a smug tone, not looking at the Entity as an enemy anymore but more as a toy that needed to be broken. ‘Soon, you will learn to beg for death. And I will not grant it to you.’

Death… the Core gained an influx of realizations as it stood before the figure of true death. There was nothing about the Queen anymore that could bring life, nothing that would allow the living to be formed out of it. In other words… the queen was without the ability to create more soldiers for her war. And she hadn't realised it yet, not having a far enough reach to detect that her Black Circles and the many hundreds of ants within were all dead. For now, she only had those still alive. And, damn it, would the Core make sure that none reached the step where they could take another breath.

‘I will win this fight. I will win every fight,’ the Core spit back, gaining the ideas needed to win the war. Its attention was drawn away from the Queen yet again as it looked within the spheres around the Mana-Line. Nearly all had been filled to the brim with energy, nearly on the point where it needed to be released lest the Entity would have to fear it being destroyed by accident. But… everything would be released in just a second.

‘I do not believe that you understood me, little rock. You cannot kill me with your pitiful materials,’ the Queen reminded the Entity, though that did nothing to stop the Core’s mood from improving. And the [Leader of the Colony] could very clearly feel that the Mana in the air telling no lies at all.

With the power of more miniature lines, the Core began to envelop the entirety of the outer part of the Colony. Every ceiling, wall, and the floor had lines flowing through them, all created within mere seconds of each other. The sheer cost was enough to send multiple waves of energy through the halls and over to where the Queen stood. The Black Mana inside the inner sanctum paused as its creator was momentarily distracted. She was, however, brought back to reality when the Core delivered its final message.

‘My goal isn’t to kill you,’ the Entity assured the [Queen of Hollows]. ‘It’s to kill all those beneath you.’

The Queen barely had time to react to the Core’s words before the countless caverns started to, well, cave in on themselves. There were hundreds if not thousands of ants and every single one of them had just been smashed, crushed, and utterly stopped from anything. The Entity kept up the treatment of the walls, making more and more stone fall onto the rubble, making the lowest layer something close to fine dust. No bones or anything close to it was left behind. All those within the Colony had been killed.

‘You!’

And the [Leader of the mostly-dead Colony] had just realized that fact, the Queen had sent out a wave of Mana herself. The results had perhaps not been what the intelligent ant had hoped for.

‘Do you even realise what you have done?’ the Queen continued, her tone instantly changed from condensing and smug into a snarl of anger and hatred. She was incarnate wrath. ‘I have spent decades building my Colony and you think I will forgive you for tearing it down? I was going to be kind and let you fight for your life but now you will suffer this day. Nothing will save you now.’

And then the Mana truly started to explode outwards, the Darkness becoming one with all. Everything in a radius of ten meters became nothing but an extremely dense cloud of Black Mana, tendrils continually jutting out of the cloud in increased speed and ferocity. Many elongated themselves, spitting ahead to where the outer layers had been. The newly dead creatures were ignored in favour of the pits of dead larvae.

Or mostly dead larvae, some having turned [Undead] before the Core had brought down the stone upon them. It had thought nothing about leaving a few trapped under the five tons of stone yet seeing multiple Black Tendrils dig through the material like it was nothing brought new thoughts to its head. More so when the [Undead] creatures were grabbed and brought right back into the inner sanctum.

In the meanwhile, the stone surrounding the larger [Worm] had been dug out, revealing the massive skeleton crushed and mangled. There was no life inside the exoskeletons anymore, at least. That all changed when the [Undead] Larvae had their Mana sucked out and forced into the larger being. With a set, the Black Mana brightened and the bones realigned, merging back into their previous placement with so much more being created out of thin air.

The Core could only watch in horror as the massive being roared.