There were even more of them in this force than in the other attacks, they were probably building up since the attacks stopped, waiting for an opening. The adventurers and guards engaged them easily enough but now their tactics seemed even stranger, there were enough of them that they could just go around the guards and attack the carts directly to get what they wanted. Maybe they didn't know where it was exactly so they wanted to disable everyone first and then look for it. While thinking about that one of the ants on the side lines turned in my direction and charged for me, club raised in the air.

I'm no fighter, I mostly pulled the dagger to feel safer by being armed. I prayed I was right about their motives and shoot both of my arms straight up in a, hopefully, multiversal sign of surrender. She stopped her charge mid swing and stared at me, her antenna twitching rapidly, and looked me over.

"It's okay, I'm not gonna fight you" I said in the calmest tone I could manage.

Her antenna slowed down their twitching and instead her head swiveled to stare at the dagger I was still holding. She jestured towards it with her upper left hand.

"Right, you want me to put the weapon away, okay. I am going to put it in my belt." I tell her while slowly lowering my hand towards the sheath. She doesn't react except to turn her head to keep the dagger center focus.

As soon as I got the dagger all the way in the sheath and moved my hand away from the handle, she dropped her club and grabbed me with all four of her hands at the same time, hoisted me off the ground, and ran back into the woods. Well damn, that either went really well or terribly, I couldn't get out because she had a hand on both of my legs so I couldn't kick and my arms had been pinned to my sides. I swear this better not result in my being eaten, after all this thinking they are not monsters. She suddenly stopped running, spun me around and put me down in front of the largest ant I've seen so far.

"Me Fighter, you?" She said pointing to herself and then at me. Other then size she wasn't really that different except that under her mandible was a human like mouth instead of an ant mouth.

Well. I should play along for now, so I pointed to myself and said "Me Kadi, why take?"

"Me not know, queen say bring men, me bring men. You walk self? No rope." She says while holding up a bundle of vines.

Uhh... "Me walk self."

She nodded her head, said "Wait fight over," and pointed to the ground.

I sat on the spot she pointed to and waited for the battle to finish. I supposed this explained everything, they were avoiding killing people because people were the thing they wanted. But why would the queen want... I slapped myself in the face. I assumed they were a complete race, but no, they aren't almost all female, they must have been one hundred percent female and needed other races to reproduce. Looking over at the one called Fighter I wondered why there was only one of her. A battle force made with sisters of her stature would be a lot more dangerous.

The sounds of battle evntually stopped and a little later two more people were carried in, their clothes were torn and their right hands looked broken, if I had to guess they were forcefully disarmed. Fighter moved over to them so she could talk to them, the ants carrying them turned them around but didn't set them down.

"Me fighter, you?" she said while pointing to both of them.

"Screw you demons!" "Varros will have revenge for this!" And one of them punctuated their declaration by spitting.

"You walk self, no rope?" She seemed confused, I think me being compliant made her think the others would be nice too.

"Oh you would like that, force us to march ourselves to exhaustion just so we can't resist whatever dark ritual you have planned!"

Fighter just frowned, took out the rope, and tied them up so they couldn't move. She then wiggled her antenna at the ones holding them and they wiggled back and placed the tied men in easier to carry positions over their shoulders. She looked over at me and a complicated expression appeared for a moment, before she just motioned for me to follow her. The walk was surprisingly not terrible besides dumb and dumber doing nothing but ranting about evil, demons, god smiting them, you know, the kind of thing fanatics do. We walked until the sun started to set and Fighter seemed to order making camp.

I say seemed because she just wiggled her antenna at some of the battle group and they just stopped walking and started clearing the ground. Now that we stopped I could look around and see how many were here, I counted twelve, eleven raiders and Fighter. When they attacked the city they always ran off when they got down to ten, but since I surrendered one left the battle early to take me to Fighter and the rest backed out when there was ten still at the battle.

The ants worked really fast at making a camp, three of them climbed trees and cut down a few branches with their mandibles and dropped them down. While the six on the ground worked together to build three single person lean-tos. It was kind of a marvel of precision engineering using only wood and, effectively, their teeth. The two screamers were rolled into their own lean-tos and just kind of left there. I wasn't being pressured to go to sleep right now so I sat next to Fighter to ask more about the ants.

"Why sisters not big like Fighter?" I said while gesturing to the others.

"Queen king die, need king make soldiers. Workers no need king."

Wait a second does that mean "Queen need men, make men king?"

She shook her head "Queen get king one time, magic make men king."

So she doesn't want to make a new king, for herself at least. "Princess make king?"

"Me no see princess... egg when leave?" She brought her hand up to her chin in thought, "If princess, princess make king."

So the queen sent out Fighter and continuous waves of workers as reinforcments in order to find a king for the new princess. That thought suddenly made me realize the situation I was in. I just walked off into the woods with some ant people simply because they seemed nice. Interacting with all the hateful racist people in town must have made me jump at the chance to hang out with the first nice person I met. Even the smith that gave me the dagger was an awful person when talking about the other races.

"Thanks talk, me sleep." I told Fighter while heading over to the empty lean-to

"If princess, you king." She said after I started moving.

I guess she thought I was the obvious pick.

It took a bit to get to sleep, tweedle dee and tweedle dum kept cursing well into the night and now that I was awake it looked like they stayed up all night being paranoid that if they relaxed for a moment they would have their insides sucked out or something. A soft gurgle from my stomach told me that I needed some food and I didn't have anything to eat on me, one of the caravan carts was handling the food. So I looked around for Fighter and realized there were a bunch more worker ants around than when I went to sleep. Seeing me up, one hurried over and gave me a leaf bowl with several fruits in it, it appeared they were the next reinforcement wave.

After doing some morning stretches and eating my fruit bowl I looked for Fighter again. After a little while she came back into the clearing with the corpse of a boar, she must have gone out hunting. I still didn't see her with a weapon, but I noticed the backs of her forearms had blood on them, meaning she bludgened it to death with her arms. When she saw me awake she then wiggled at the workers, they grabbed the other two and we were once again on the march. I hustled a little to get next to Fighter so I can talk to her.

"Hive close?"

"Yes, hive close, eat meat when return," she smiled.

"You hunt no spear?" I asked while pointing to her bloodied arm.

"Arms strong, break club with arms." Her smile turned into more of a smirk, I guess she was proud of that fact.

I wasn't sure what to ask next so we just kept walking in silence. It was almost noon when we came upon the entrance to the hive. There were two guard ants that shared Fighter's build next to it, it looked like the queen was keeping her real fighting force at home to keep her safe. After they wiggled antenna to each other Fighter led me and the ants with the other men somewhere, while the rest of the workers split off down other tunnels as we passed them. We finally get to a chamber that had two more large guard ants. Another round of antenna wiggling happened and we were let in.

"You live here, wait princess adult." she said while pointing into the chamber.

It was fairly decent considering the tech level they had. There were six wooden beds covered in clean dried grass that felt kinda comfy, certainly better than the ground. While looking around I realized I could still see even though I was underground, looking up I saw something odd, it was another ant, she was even smaller than a worker but her abdomen was glowing like a firefly's and she also seemed to be asleep. I turned towards Fighter who was directing the workers to put the two other men on two of the beds.

"Why ant light?" I questioned as I pointed up at the glowing ant.

"Ants in dark not see far, little sister magic light. Price, must sleep, always." She seemed sad that the little sister had to sleep. "Workers feed one time many days."

"Thank you, get meat later?" I asked about the boar she was still carrying.

"Yes, cook meat, eat, then sleep." And then she left, probably to cook the meat.

Well, now I was alone with the two crazy people and a sleeping glow ant. The other men were clearly exhausted from being awake for over a day and in a constant state of paranoid awareness. So I just left them alone for now. Maybe once they finally slept and see that letting their guard down didn't result in death they would be less tense and can be talked to. For now I decided to read some more of my book, maybe switch out to exercise in a bit. Hopefully the ants would let me explore with an escort if I could get them to trust me.