Bring! Stop! Bring! Stop! Bring! Stop!

—The fourth survivor told his captain, Rust ‘Iron clawed’, when he was sent to calm the soldier.

—I underestimated you.

“Not unexpected of you. You have never foraged a living in the shade, have you?”

—I have heard you use the word many times. What is this shade that you speak off?

“That is of no importance to you. Now repent.” I said conjuring an air bullet to my left.

—Wait-wait! Don’t destroy me. I can be of greater use to you complete than broken. I can provide you food. Yes. I heard your conversation. I can help with your food shortage. You can even use my dungeon as a shelter. Just think what effect my dungeon will have on your colony. I’ll keep you protected and safe. I’ll even comply with all of your wishes. Please, don’t destroy me. You can’t destroy me. You can’t!

“I’ll be stupid to agree to your request. Let’s not debate whether you can fulfill your promises or not, the risk you command alone is heavier than anything material you can promise.”

—At least fulfill my one final wish!

“Why would I do any such thing?” I said, removing my hold over the air bullet floating near me and watching it streak toward the crystal core. This time the core shattered — beautifully turning into pieces with a flash of rainbow light, before disappearing into burning particles of white and freeing the farm from its curse.

The core was destroyed, however, the question remained: Should I have retrieved the core instead of destroying it?

The core had made some enticing promises, but the memories of the mindless puppets I had to kill in order to get my hands around its lifeline didn’t let me make the mistake. Having recently been through the parasitic invasion, I couldn’t bring myself to bring another threat into the colony and set it ablaze with my own hands—no matter the initial safety it could have provided, because the end would have happened the same way, like always.

You can’t expect someone who knows the taste of freedom to give everything up and not yearn to make things as they were in the past. Thieves steal, murderers kill and prisoners hope. You can take one's freedom but you can’t take their hope, and until hope remains there remains a chance of future retaliation. Moreover, I had no way of making the core yield. Hence, there was no point in pondering something that wasn’t possible in the first place.

A buzz ringed in my surroundings as soon as the crystal core shattered. An invisible force tugged at my body and tried to pull me along. My blessing tried to resist the force, but the system's warning dissolved my resistance. A chill had silently crept into the hollow I noticed from the steam rising from my body, and my surroundings had turned unbearably silent. I wasn’t able to pick the slightest of sounds, from neither the air nor the ground. The silence was akin to the receded water before a tide. The systems warning adding to my paranoia, I allowed the force tugging at my body to take me where it was flowing to.

{This pocket space has lost the power keeping it shaped. It will soon lose its stability and fall upon itself.}

{Please don’t resist the force trying to bring you outside. Nothing good will result from such hardheadedness.}

I only felt the primary quake ripple the hollow and saw a series of cracks to start eating into it, when the world warped around me and took me away from the chaos which was about to erupt there. Similar to how the sphere had first transported me into the dungeon, the hollow extended infinitely in my sight to the point where I was part of both the end and the beginning. Then motion happened and I was out.

No one was there to welcome me back. That fouled my mood slightly.

A hum of energy got my attention; I turned and found the sphere rapidly spinning and shrinking. The once smooth ripples of its surface were now large and chaotic as tides in the sea during a storm. The hum it produced got louder as its rotation picked pace and volume condensed.

I intently watched its ongoing destruction—as it became smaller and louder, from the size of a stone to a pebble and finally a grain, before its deafening hum reached a peak and, it disappeared from my sight and senses alike.

I grew worried upon the sphere's disappearance, worrying oven a possible explosion of all that condensed energy, but found relief when the system rang in my head and congratulated me for conquering the dungeon.

You have conquered an E-tier dungeon. You have been awarded +2 points to all of your stats.

{You have destroyed the E rank dungeon: Graveyard of feelings.}

{Title: Dungeon conqueror acquired.}

[Dungeon conqueror][Title]

[This title is attained by those who have destroyed a dungeon core.]

[Effect: It adds 10 points to your Intelligence stat.][Increases the more dungeons you destroy.]

[Effect: Dungeon monsters become aggressive toward you on sight.]

[Higher tiered dungeons give higher rewards.]

There was however a tremble and I had to accelerate out the tunnel leading to the surface in order to save myself from the potential caving in.

A few miles south of a hidden ant farm, there was a huge assemble of multi-colored ants waiting at the foot of a mountainous mound outside a natural dark entrance leading into the depths of the said mound. Waiting, I say, because that’s what the ants were doing; at least some of them were.

Their number though large weren’t’ even half of what they had started with, as most of what had been a hastily assembled army were already on their way back to the farm they had marched on from. The army had assembled to fight a war, which considering their numbers would have been existential, had it happened; being part of the reason why only half the army had remained to wait, while the rest had already returned. The reason behind this was a small but important misplacement of information at the command level of this army.

The officers leading the army weren’t told that their enemies —the bugs that had the farm razed to the ground and under terror— were a living breathing part of a consciously vicious existence called a dungeon; and that, while the enemies were themselves strong in numbers, intent and strength, could only be met inside the said intelligent, vicious, dungeon, which, as a matter of protecting its protectors, only allowed thirty-six participants to challenge —Yes, that’s right: challenge, not engage or swarm or trap— its puppets at a time.

And challenge the ants had presented.

Six explorers, more driven by circumstance than bravery, had entered through one of the six entrances leading into the belly of the dungeon where they had shown courage where courage was required and heart where tough decisions were of necessity. In the end, after surviving death a little too many times for a single day’s worth, unfortunately, they had to retreat from the dungeon with their challenge incomplete. But that is not the end, for one of them, an ant of a silver gradient with the shine of a hero glowing in his eyes, remained behind to pick the banner which the others had dropped and kept the challenge alive. His effort would have made his companions proud were they with him. But then again, he wouldn’t have forced them to leave if they hadn’t been more of a bother than help, and would have gotten to see him in the act then.

I’m not saying that he died. No. He failed the challenge, however. Not the one which his party had thrown at the dungeons face. That one he completed. The dungeon was destroyed, its puppets all beaten or killed. What he failed was his personal task; the one where he was supposed to find the ants that had been kidnapped from the farm and save them, especially the one friend he had made over there—an ant named Billy. He failed to save the ants because of they too, like the bugs and the caterpillars and the other insects of the dungeon, had already been brainwashed into mindless zombies by the time he had set foot into the dungeon. As a matter of fact, he had to kill the ones he had wanted to save with his own hand in order to save the other five explorers from certain doom and a similar end.

This was one reason behind his sadness; other being the absence of the companions he had finally found friends in at the dungeon's entrance at his return. Although he wasn’t able to save the ants, he had at least been able to make sure that his colony wouldn’t starve for the next few months by saving the farm from the dungeons curse. This knowledge was enough to make him lift his head and travel up the tunnel leading to the surface, and that the antechamber he had returned to was also a part of the dungeon and was crumbling along with it. Not that a cave-in would have killed him, but it would have troubled him for sure.

Now here we are. Our challenger returns to the surface full of hope, found the friends he was hoping to appease, on their feet, and panics. Their panic confuses him; for he doesn’t realize that no one among the soldiers had recognized him. He, in his hurry, had completely forgotten that he was not the same ant whom the soldiers had seen leaving their ranks to join the team of explores about to risk their lives by entering the ominous spheres which had already eaten a few good soldiers before them.

He had left as an awe aspiring ant of an unnatural variant —silver of color from his antennae to his abdominal end, poised, lean, and agile— and returned a being of strength, of thick armored limbs, and chiseled perfect looks. He wasn’t larger than the soldiers watching him, but there was something dangerous about him, they could feel it.

The aura radiating from him drove the closer few to the ground and the farther ones to silence. Not all the soldiers understood what was happening —as to why their companions had suddenly grown panicked— but those few that did understood they would have had an easier time handling the swarm of bugs than facing this one being of imaginable stature that had come to greet them out of the one place they were guarding/watching.

The officers of rank who were in the back discussing their next step, since neither the sphere had disappeared to signify the challengers death and nor had the challenger returned like the rest of his team (since the last they had checked), were initially also taken back by the intruders appearance, and were about to order their respective battalions to take him down, and they would have if it wasn’t for one of their ally, an ant of the resting dungeon explorers, who had gotten up and started running toward the intruder without a care for protocol.

It’s not easy to control all the soldiers of a few thousand soldier army, you see. A commander can only do so much. In the end, it’s about respect; which that pink shaded ant possibly had none for the commanders or the station they represented.

The rogue explorer rushed past the gawking soldiers and lunged at the intruder, our challenger, the rookie his former captain (his love) had admitted into her team of which he was the vice-leader, his friend, without caring that he could be wrong, that the one he was lunging at could be an enemy. But he wasn’t wrong and didn’t get to meet the maker.

“You rotten stupid maniac, what the hell were you thinking, Jack?”

“I—I’m sorry.”

“Sorry—you are sorry?! You went and pulled out that stunt and now you want my forgiveness—our forgiveness? Why jack—why? I thought we were friends. I thought you cared. But you clearly don’t. You stupid idiot!”

“You can’t say I don’t care. I care. I obviously really care! That’s why I had to force you all out. You would have died otherwise. You all would have died! First Minnie died, and then Billy went ahead and got kidnapped and then died, too. I could see you all struggling against the caterpillars. How could I have not done what I did? I did what I had to do. I did it all to save you and Pyro and Mink and Dark and—”

“Who the hell cares about dying? We are ants, you stupid idiot! Ants die every day by the hundreds and thousands. Do you want to try saving them, too? What the hell do you think you are—a savior? Get over yourself.”

“Jack,” Dark manifested out of Genma’s shadow. He wasn’t alone though, for he had brought David along, and he was at my face the second Dark loosened his hold. David didn’t speak, however. Dark was the one who did the talking, while David just stared at me, started through me.

“What you need to understand is that,” Dark continued in the background. “No matter the circumstance or danger, you don’t abandon one of your own. And that’s what you did. You made us abandon you alone in the dungeon. We had entered together. So we should have come out together, too. But we didn’t. You can’t begin to imagine how we felt upon finding out that you had decided to stay behind. Genma is right. You need to get over yourself.”

I could see it in David’s eyes: his disappointment and anger. His eyes were hard and stern. And he stared rather than looked with them, staring right at me, through me. But they softened. I panicked when they did.

“The bugs?” he said, asked.

“Dead,” I replied, murmured.

“So, the farm,” He questioned, calmly, assertively.

“Is no longer in danger,” I finished, slowly, intuitively.

“I—” he hesitated then continued. “This doesn’t mean anything. Do you understand? I’m not taking you back on the team.” He finished, quickly. I nodded and waited. We waited. A pause. Deliberate. Then he spoke again.

He said, started, “I’m glad you are safe.”

I looked up. He was watching, gazing—caringly.

“Welcome back.” He finished.