Inside . . . friends . . . we, leaving . . . then gone . . . all. I survived . . . alone.

—Minute, currently soldier of the 3rd troop.

A stale gust brushed past me, laughing, as I rushed outside the tower.

The world was bright but covered in a black haze that moved independently of the wind. Screams and cries had the air packed, while squished bodies and rushing ants had the bridges jammed. I stood slew jacked as carriers rushed past me and into the tower, hiding inside the wide compound, keeping their terrified eyes on the sky outside as if death itself was clouding the sky.

It was an overwhelming sight, one I wasn’t thinking of finding myself in again, so soon. Life I understand is full of trials, but I felt cursed standing there in the middle of the death filled crossroad. Eventually, I controlled myself and found the source of the scents that had wakened me. They were coming from afar, from the farm's direction. It didn’t take me long to connect the dots. Everyone was running away from the farm, so that was the place I needed to be. I tried to locate my companions, but none could be seen around. I checked on my map, remembering talking about it with Tiny, and found their position marked on the map. All of them were already at the farm. It confused me as to why they had left me behind, but it was no time to be stagnant. If there was something which could send such a large community into panic, then there was a chance my team could be in danger. Guilt surged inside me thinking I had broken another promise. One was with Genma: I had promised him I would protect Minnie; another with myself. A carrier pushed me aside, bringing me out of the daze.

Reprimanding myself I activated haste demon and ran with all I had. With haste passively raising my pace by 2.5 times and haste demon further doubling it, I zipped past the coming rush of ants like a bullet of air. My mana and stamina both dropped at a rapid rate. Haste alone wasn’t strenuous on my body, as it was already a part of me, but using haste demon (which sucked stamina for every second it was activated to push my body past the limits of speed) added a huge toll on my stamina, raising its consumption by four times the normal. Add to that my use of Perception and sensitive hearing to keep me on the path and spike my senses, and 3-D maneuvering to dodge the obstacles, I wouldn’t have found it odd to see more than half of my stamina gone empty just to reach the farm.

It was only thanks to higher stamina preservation and regeneration that I was left with a little over half my stamina by the time I reached the first checkpoint. My fighting ability would have been cut in half without them. The system rang multiple times in my head on the way, notifying me of my rising skill levels, but I ignored them as best as I could. It wasn’t the time to think about the skills. There were lives on the line.

I crossed the checkpoints like an arrow and found them empty. Although the carriers were still rushing off the farm, it struck me hard that none of the soldiers had tried to make a run for their lives. If I couldn’t see them outside, then it only meant one thing, they were all fighting to save the farm. This was the unity, the mentality which bonded me with my brothers, which kept me trying to do more for them. Because no matter how hopeless the situation, we ants never give. There are no deserters among us.

The sight at the farm’s entrance, however, sucked the air out of my body. All around me lay sawed halves of carriers and soldiers, their crucial fluids dripping down the leaves and wetting the ground below. There were tens of bodies lying at the entrance alone. The further in I went, the harder it became for me to imagine the scale at which this fight was happening. I saw no soldiers alive on the outskirts, though the aphids seemed to have been left untouched. They kept filling their bellies, dripping drops of sweet-scented honeydew from their behinds, as if unaware of the gruesome account around them.

I followed the pheromones in the air to the nearest source and saw a similar sight of untold horror sprawled relentlessly in front of me. A strong wind was careering through the farm, carrying pain-filled voices and sound of battle and spreading them evenly throughout.

My body tensed at the thought that I was too late. I wasn’t even sure how much of a help I would be against something that had devastated a committee where close to ten thousand ants resided, but I wasn’t about to give up. No. I was just starting to understand the responsibilities associated with being an explorer. The farm meant a lot more for our colony than my life. I couldn’t let all of our work to go down the drain. I just couldn’t.

Putting my skills on the overdrive, I expanded my senses to my furthest, climbing to the edge of the tallest branch and looked, really looked for a site where the battle might still be happening and found a large grey cloud hovering in the middle of the farm. I used my sight to further capture the image in detail and found that it wasn’t a cloud hovering above the farm, but close to a hundred flying creatures, some of which carried unconscious ants in their talons.

There was at least a four-meter long distance between us, and the flying creatures were starting to fall back, taking the captured ants along with them. I used the only option I had and overdrove my acceleration. That quadrupled my mana consumption from 15 to 60, but also raised my agility by 10 times, a single step after which sent me flying toward the center of the farm at an unprecedented speed. One moment I was looking in from the sidelines and in the next moment, my face was rapidly coming closer to the rough surface of a green leaf right in the center of where the fight was the most concentrated. To tell the truth, I had picked the spot based on where my friends were. It was selfish of me, I know, but it was the result of losing Minnie. I didn’t have it in me to lose someone else I knew. I had left her on her own and that had taken her life. I wasn’t going to repeat the same mistake. I would lose more than just sleep if such a thing happened.

I glided, to remove some of my momentum, but that wasn’t my intention. I only wanted to correct my posture, which gliding excellently did, and dumped mana into feather fall to remove rest of the kinetic energy from my body. It sucked half of my remaining mana, leaving me with one-fourth of my total and allowed me to touchdown without putting a single strain on my legs. It was a dramatic enough entry to get the attention of many around. Had I been unable to use feather fall, I would have possibly punched through my landing leaf like an air bullet and disappeared into the distance, bringing others to their doom along with me.

I hurriedly looked around and found my friends struggling against two Black-bellied creatures with stark red dots over their back armor. Although these flying creatures didn’t use any skills, they were more than thrice the size of my team members and could fly. These creatures weren’t alone, but neither were my teammates. Each hailed a group of close to a hundred soldiers and fought back. Other than the black-bellied creatures, there were also green, long and ribbed tailed bugs with beady eyes and lacy wings, hoppers with brown bodies, and creatures that had large patterned wings like the seers. There were also gigantic caterpillars with armored backs and barbed sides prowling around. This battlefield was a mess and we were losing. Strangely, only the caterpillars were doing any real damage to the soldiers, while the others either kept watch from the air or grabbed the soldiers to take them away. They didn’t physically hurt anybody.

It was an invasion, a true invasion. Plum crawlers wriggled everywhere; their backs were spiked, and colors one brighter than the last.

“Hold your position! Don’t you dare falter! Hold the line!” I heard Commander Yuvi yelling at his army. Accessing that they weren’t in trouble I hurried to David’s aid. I slammed into a crawler that was about to crush a soldier under its weight and activated Group heal, a special ability of second-tier, to help the injured. There was not enough time to individually help those in need, but I did what I could. Pushing spikes into the body of a plume crawler, I stopped it in track, after which the soldiers took over. I tried to root a long bellied flier to the stalk, but it easily chewed through and escaped.

I appraised it to get a general idea of the strength of our foes, and almost tripped upon finding that we were up against E-tier enemies. Activating Appraisal with Sight gave me the shock of my life. Most of the flying creatures, which my appraisal termed as bugs, were twice evolved predators of the E-tier. Meaning, we were doomed. Forgetting everything, I rushed to my companions and tackled one of the two black-bellied ladybugs, as appraisal had named them, and slammed her on the leafy surface. The leaf bounced up and down from the force of the swing and pushed the ladybug back into the air, but also away from us.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” I asked, firing an air bullet at the other ladybug hovering above them, and winced when the same bullet which had gutted many of my enemies in the past was easily shrugged away by the creature.

“We didn’t think it necessary to wake you up just to round the farm,” Pyro answered, attacking a plum carrier with a flickering ball of heat as it tried to chew a soldier’s head off.

“Besides, you wouldn’t have got to make such a dramatic entry had you come with us!” He added, and pulled the soldier away from the crawler, bringing him under the umbrella of my Group Heal, which I had to close right after the soldier healed enough to get back to safety; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been left with any mana to fight.

“Don’t do it again!” I firmly said and heard Dark curse behind me. He was the only one among us who was faring well against the crawlers. And he was fighting alone. I knew he was strong, but to fight against something which the others were keeping busy in groups was a feat worthy of making him a hero.

“So you want to get into another situation like this?” I heard him say before he was off to help a group struggling with their opponent. I wanted to watch him fighting but didn’t have the leisure. The ladybug whom I had sent swinging was back and had brought along three crawlers to even the fight. Even a lone crawler was a pain in the head; I didn’t know how we would get out of the situation. Understanding that our situation would worsen if all five of our opponents attacked us at the same time, I decided to take the bugs away from my team. That would give them some room to breathe. I knew it would be hard, but it had to be done. I would rather it be me who drew the shortest straw than them.

I saw my old vice-leader Genma watching me. “What are you thinking?” his eyes seemed to be asking. I told him to tell David, who was fighting alongside him, that I will handle the bugs. I didn’t know how long it would take for me to fight off the thing, but I had no choice. David passed me a questioning glance, which I answered with a stare back. He pushed a soldier out of the harm’s way and clubbed a hopper with his antennas, breaking its leg, before falling back near me.

“What are you doing?” he asked coming closer.

“I’m going to get one of those bugs off your back if you promise to take the others to safety.”

“You can’t fight that!” he said pointing his antennas at the bug harassing the soldiers. I didn’t know what he was trying to find, but he agreed in the end.

“Alright, but you come right back if the fight gets difficult. You are not alone. Don’t forget that.”

“I know.” I acknowledged and turned to face the ladybug battling with Mink and Pyro, and lunged at it.

My intentions weren’t to harm the bug, but to get its attention. I had a plan. Headbutting it on the back, I rolled away and stood back upright as the bug shrieked in annoyance and turn to face me. I jerked my head at the dynamic duo now rid of its love, and gestured them to meet with David, all the while opening my trap-jaw to its fullest, only to close it with such intensity that an ethereal crescent made of mana shot toward the bug at blinding speed at their locking, trailing behind flickering flakes of blue. It was mend wave, one of my earliest attacking skills, which now after such a long time looked like a fissure expanding in the space and trying to swallow everything in its path.

The ladybug, however, had her magic. She tucked her wings under their dotted armored covers and rolled into a ball, and my mend wave scattered like blue smoke upon contact. But that was to be expected. I wasn’t expecting to kill her with such a basic racial skill. If there was something which my recent fight with a hopper had taught me, it was that the difference between tiers was larger than a simple sum of the stats under them. The stats might favor me in this fight, but their sum after the calculations very possibly put us as equals. However, I wasn’t completely out of my league against the ladybug. I was balanced and strong in every aspect, while most everyone, including my current opponent, favored a single aspect of strength at most.

The result of this could be seen from the painful shriek she gave upon falling to the ground from the impact. She might have more than enough armor to counter my attacking power, but hard armor isn’t flexible. Although she looked unharmed from the outside, inspection told me in detail of the harm the impact force had done to its insides. And this was just a start.

My opponent’s painful shrieks attracted her companion’s attention, and to seal the deal, I provoked her, which failed. So I used mystify, which also failed, but that is what I wanted. It was the effect of mystify which could make someone my slave or provoke them against me. Suffice to say, the failure made her resent and fixate on me. With that half of my work was done. I watched my team fighting against the crawlers and conjured a thick rope of mana using ten points, molded its two ends into a hook and a loop. The hook I stuck into the belly of the beast and the loop around its companion’s leg. Next, I checked my mana, saw it was nicely regenerating, nodded toward my companions, and jumped off the leaf. The provoked bug came right after me, straining the rope and pulling her companion along for the ride.