You know, I don't know how or why the Administrator was able to stretch the definition of the first biome to anything with armies in it. Generally, to this point, Dungeons had for me been pretty predictable things, in a certain sense: wandering baddies and some traps or tricks, and then a single powerful enemy to defeat at the end of it, all with a common aesthetic. This biome had very different aesthetics and very different baddies, to the point that they had to have been straining against whatever the rules actually were.

The "boss fight" was a continuation of that thread, of course.

There are a lot of things I might have imagined capping off the "army" biome. Zombie hordes, for example; the sheer weight of numbers would have made for an interesting challenge while still fitting with the fact that the masses weren't high skill opponents. Or, maybe trying to defeat a general in the middle of a war, after first fighting through an enemy camp, something like that.

No, we got ants.

It wasn't a joke floor, that much was clear. These were people-sized soldier ants, and there were a lot of them--effectively, she said, infinite. They were infesting a ruined suburban town, with some mild hills and a fair number of trees, so that it's not like we at any point had line of sight to everything. The ants weren't psychicly linked or anything, but they were sensitive to noise, so Susie's gun was unfortunately not a good call for the floor. They also had some kind of scent thing that was a little slower than noises as far as attracting attention, but once it went off, it was inevitable that the entire swarm would be there, sooner or later.

We started in a locked room with a timer, which would unlock when the floor refreshed after the last batch. Again, we somehow lucked into getting there when another group was present--not the same group as last time, since they had not made the tower with their parachutes and were well behind us at this point. No, we caught the tail end of the preparation of another group, which was another four people.

I was in kind of a macabre mood as I looked at them--Louise's death was still heavy on my mind, even if again, it was a temporary thing. The guy who seemed to be in charge of the four was actually their sneak-thief, by the looks of him--tall, lanky, with some kind of oily quality to him that was hard to pin down, except that I saw it a lot in my stealth and critical bladework classes. He looked... exhausted. Probably, this whole biome was a challenge to someone with his skillset, who didn't like the idea of a frontal assault. They also had a gun user with some kind of advanced laser rifle, though from the way she handled it I don't think it was her main weapon, and a roughly bear-sized and -shaped man who was probably their tank, with a redheaded man that I thought was a mage as their third. In all, a reasonably balanced party, though they seemed off.

"Bad luck on the timer, you two," said slick, as he fidgeted with a dagger. "About thirty seconds to go."

"We'll be okay," Susie assured him, looking briefly at me, but I wasn't in the mood to chat, and she knew it. "We're probably going stealth. Which direction is the boss?"

"She'll be north-ish," slick replied after a moment, with a shrug. "Aside from that--"

And then the floor of the room dropped out from under us.

We landed on the roof of a large building, probably a shopping mall from the size and generally confusing layout. There were large holes chewed in it, and worker ants--smaller than the soldiers, and less interested in us--busily moving debris around.

Slick and I both dropped pretty immediately into stealth, and from what I could see, he was better at it than I was, though whether that was skill rank or just level I don't know. The rest of his party, and Susie, were definitely not at a stealth level where they were completely invisible, but they all faded at least a bit. Of course, since we were partied up, Susie still knew where I was, and the other party knew where their sneak was, or at least, I assumed so.

Anyway, we split up. Susie looked at me, and gestured, and she led, and I followed. I was a stealthy boy, but I didn't know the floor, and she did. Unless she needed me to scout, I'd follow her lead.

We got off of the building and a ways down the street before Susie slipped with her stealth enough to cause a scene. It was bad luck, and not anything she really did wrong; her skill level was just too low, I guess, combined with bad timing. A soldier ant spotted her, and let out a screech-like noise that a lot of other ants started reacting to.

Susie picked up a large nearby rock and threw it at his head, which didn't kill him but was an effective distraction until she got to a hiding place and dropped back into stealth. But, the damage was done--a smell was in the air, and more ants nearby were responding to the smell and the noise.

I used telekinesis to bring us up to the nearest rooftop, and I had to watch in macabre fascination as a group of ants crawled into, out of, and over buildings in the general area, showing no respect whatsoever for normal human patterns. They ignored sidewalks and painted lines on the road, their passages went straight through walls, they had dropped debris in front of doors and windows... in all respects, they were alien creatures just wandering through what should have felt like a familiar place.

"Keep moving," Susie whispered, and we did. There were already probably a dozen soldier ants snooping around where we'd been, and while Susie assured me we could handle them in a fight, the longer we stayed in one place, the more ants there would be to fight. And, as I said, the total number was effectively infinite.

Maybe someday, if I could one-shot the things, I'd enjoy the thought of crushing endless swarms of the creatures, but not today.

Again, being on the roof didn't help as much as it should have in terms of avoiding the things. Ants could climb the sides of the buildings, plus their tunnels ran through the roof in places--some tunnels only the size of a single person, some twice or four times the size. Susie had me glance down some of the tunnels to get a general direction about where they were going, so we could head towards the center, but otherwise we stayed away.

Because of course our job in a boss fight was to kill the Queen ant, which was going to mean going straight into the center of the nest.

It was clear when we were getting close, of course, because the ants lived in an anthill, built from rubble with a giant-ass hole in the top of it, plus several other smaller ways in and out. Susie's stealth wouldn't let us get all the way in without a fight, but once we were inside the tunnels, she could pull out her gun without alerting the entire population for miles around--apparently being inside a giant pile of rubble made for terrible acoustics, and sound didn't travel all that far.

She was stressed out, and that stressed me out, because while I could definitely stealth my way in and maybe win the boss fight, if the odds were against her they were sure as hell against me.

"You sure we're okay?" I asked, a little freaked out by her nerves, but she just shook her head at me.

"I've faced worse odds. It's just... scary. Once I start shooting we won't hear them coming, and there will be no end to them until..." she shook her head. "Anyway, we just have to hurry. The boss fight won't be that bad."

So in just a couple minutes after that, she jumped out of hiding and punched a soldier ant in the face with her steam knuckles, then giving it a couple quick jabs to the body until it died. I did... about as well against another, getting more critical hits than she did and making the most of its confusion, but it was enough to know that this was not going to be a walk in the park.

We sprinted for a large tunnel, and another Soldier emerged from it, squealing. Susie took him out, and I moved forward, pushing my telekinetic sense to the maximum.

There was a lot to sense. The piles of rubble were so porous that it was hard to filter them out in my head, even though I was mostly looking for signs of anything moving. Merry tried her best, too, and between us we got a decent enough picture to know that the Queen was not, like, right in front of us or anything. The tunnels went down, and down we'd have to go.

I'd like to phrase it as though I'm sparing you the details, but mostly, I got kind of overwhelmed in the hour or so that followed. We went down, fought a lot of ants, discovered that the queen was not exactly at the bottom of the tunnel we'd started on, and had to go searching. Susie's gun was a lifesaver, but it was also incredibly loud and not being able to hear anything else was starting to wear on our nerves. I thought we'd found it at one point only to discover an egg chamber without a queen in it, which was... scary, because of how many eggs there were there, along with a bunch of workers tending to them.

And that gave us a lead on finding the queen, at least. The eggs came from somewhere.

The queen's chambers were large, and full of mostly worker ants, though soldiers had been following us for a while. I was suddenly in charge of delaying them while Susie pumped brass at the Queen, because while the boss herself only had so much health, the workers threw themselves into the line of fire tirelessly until they were gone.

It was... gross, and depressing. I didn't exactly like the ants, but killing things that were acting selfless itched at me. So I focused on using telekinesis and the Executioner sword to keep the soldiers at bay, and in the end, the fight didn't take all that much longer.

The Queen's dying scream seemed to cause the soldiers to flee, which was good. It also made the exit appear, which was better, and we both jumped down it without any reservation whatsoever. We were done with this floor, in every meaning of the phrase.

The town that appeared before us was familiar in all but the aesthetics. The same buildings, the same NPCs. The Chuch was where it ought to be, and I headed there before spending any more time thinking about anything. I presented Louise's corpse for resurrection, and the fake Priestess NPC bowed and led me to an altar where Louise began to reappear.

I held back on trying to hug her or cry until she opened her eyes, but when she did, I couldn't hold back any more.Even though it hadn't been long... it still felt wrong. It felt like I'd done something awful. And when she was there, and alive, and awake again, I couldn't stop myself from grabbing onto her and losing a fair amount of water and snot out of my face over the next little while.

And she responded by hugging me back, and things didn't seem so bad for a while after that.