Author's Note:-

This is the first chapter of today.

Yeah, that means there is another chapter coming today.

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Enjoy.

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Third Person P.O.V:-

D’sue opened his eyes and saw that his shield, the one that he never let anyone touch, one of his most favorite had saved him this time and he was sliding on top of it. But before he could smile to this accomplishment, his body tensed because he remembered, the ant which had rammed into his back, was still there.

He once again swiftly used shield bash, but this time he used it directly on the ground and the impact forced his body to fly straight into the air. He rotated twice in the air to shake the ant off his body and dropped back down on his feet, before rolling away from that place.

When his vision stationed, he looked around to find where that ant was, but what his eyes saw left him a lot more astonished than frustrated. He saw only a head lying on the ground and there was no ant nearby.

 He panicked and tried to find it everywhere, but his efforts bore no result. When his eyes looked back at that half burnt head he saw that it was an ants head with its mandible and rest of his body missing, whilst some ash was flying around in the air.

 He felt a bit shocked and without thinking he looked behind his back and saw that those missing mandible were firmly embedded into his armor. He thanked god that his armor had saved him this time, but his brows creased when he saw that, actually it was his armor that was completely torn apart by those mandibles and they were still in perfect condition.

Behind that half burnt-half broken Martha was standing looking at him while her face held a warm smile. He pointed towards the head and then at her, as if asking whether she was the one who killed the ant. And to that, Minnie nodded her head in confirmation, but her face never ceased to smile.

"So, what happened? Tell me." he asked her, looking a bit exhausted.

Martha pondered a bit, thinking how she should explain this, but then she nodded her head once and starting speaking leisurely, "When you rushed in to attack that one ant that was backing away, I saw that the other one started running toward your back. Because I didn’t want to take any chance, I started preparing a fireball, just in case if I really needed to use it. When you collided with that ant the other one took the opportunity and attacked, to cut your neck in half with its mandibles.”

“And then what happened next.” He asked.

“While moving towards you, it completely forgot about me, and when it showed its back to me, I saw the chance and took it. But because the time was too tight to prepare a really strong attack, I fired the fireball I had been preparing. So when it collided with its back, all of its body got burn down and only his head was left unscathed.”

D’sue sighed and said, “It’s a good thing that you didn’t have enough time to prepare the attack, otherwise forget about the ant, even my body would have turned into ash alongside it.” He moved his head from left to right, then again asked he, “what happened next?”

The smile on her face vanished, but she continued explaining whilst her eyes became teary, “Because my fireball attack couldn’t burn its head, it continued to travel with the momentum that its body was running at, and with its open mouth it struck your back.” She stopped after saying this much, bowed her head to him and asked him for forgiveness, “I'm sorry I was not useful to you at all. If I had acted with you then you wouldn’t have to confront both of them, but because of my incompetency, you had to fight both of them and in the end even my spell hurt you. I’m sorry."

He sighed looking at the smiling girl who had turned sad now and said, "Don’t worry about it. It’s not like that thing hurt me or anything, but this is how things happened, huh. I thought I was going to die at that time, and I think that I really would have died, if you hadn't intervened and took the chance to kill it. So thank you for saving my life. I’ll never forget about this favor, and will try my best to pay it.”

She was thinking that he would be angry at her for not moving quick enough and would leave her behind, but all of her worries were for nothing as he thanked her for saving his life instead of accusing her for being slow.

“But tell me something, how confident were you that you had no two thoughts before firing that atom crusher toward me? What kind of training did you do to be so sure of your marksmanship?" he asked her curiously.

She blushed and her head bowed even more, before she spoke in a very low voice, "Actually I didn't think about anything then. I just thought, I had to at least do something. I got lucky and my spell struck the ant, not you. Hehehe."

"What the?? Lucky! Please don't start firing such dangerous skills on me again."Hearing him say that she felt her chest tighten and her mood saddened. She didn't know why, but she was very eager to hear his praise, but that didn't happen.

"But thanks for saving me. If you hadn't taken the chance then I would be dead right now."He said while walking toward her.

But instead of decreasing the distance between them and reaching her, he stopped before the ant head and picked it up. At this time instead of vanishing the head got engulfed in a fervent flash of light and once the light retracted, D’sue saw that a pair of eye lenses had taken its place.

They resembled the eyes of the ant that he had killed. Unlike the eyes of a regular ant, these were not compound eyes, but were like pieces of glass, grey in color.

Though they looked a bit creepy, but he still wore them on his eyes, but nothing happened. While the ant head gave him the eye pieces the other ant vanished into thin air and their bodies were instead replaced by two small antennas.

He didn’t know why, but with the eye pieces over his eyes he picked them up. He held them in his left and right hand and brought it closer to his eyes over his head, to see them a bit clearly. But unexpectedly those antennas started vibrating; amazingly and suddenly they extended and got attached to his head. He felt surprised and a bit worried to the sudden situation that he found himself in. He was going to try removing those unwanted objects from his head, when the glass pieces over his eyes started reacting and his vision started changing.

 The darkness, that had been challenging them from the starting vanished, what took its place was bright dots of light, covering everything and everywhere.

He could clearly see the walls and the floor even the tunnel before him became clear as day. He couldn’t help but feel a bit surprised by it. He traced his eyes back to look at Martha, and he understood that even though it was helping him to see everything around him clearly, even in this dark and bad atmosphere, but it couldn’t capture details at all. When he looked at Martha he didn’t see her face, but instead a slightly bright ball of orange light.

‘Well, that’s understandable. So, it looks like even though those ants can’t clearly see us, but if they have this kind of vision, then it is enough for them. They could still see us a ball of light travelling towards them, where we were travelling blind in this darkness.’ he thought.

When he was playing with his new found toy, Minie was watching him. She saw the ant head being replaced with some kind of lenses and the other ant dropped its antennas after vanishing.

She thought that he would keep them in his sack, but to her surprise, he wore them and started looking everywhere. It was okay until that, but then slowly, a creepy smile formed on his face.

‘What! What happened after he wore them? Are those …x-ray’ her nonsensical thoughts were still going on, but then he turned to look back at her. He kept on looking at her for some time, but then his smiling face slowly returned to normal and he sighed once, before moving his head in denial as if he didn’t like what he saw.

She didn’t move for a sec, but got angry and started striding towards him, but before she had even taken five steps forward, her thoughts hit and she looked down before she sat down, curled into a ball and started screaming” No, no don’t look don’t look. Please I’m still a virgin don’t look at meee!”

D’sue felt a bit bewildered, ‘what happened?’ he thought. But no matter how great his brain was, how could he have come to the reason for which she was screaming about.

“Remove those! Please remove those!” she cried out without even looking at him.

‘Huh! Do these have other powers than simple mana vision? Is she in pain?’ he thought when he saw her screaming. He hurriedly removed those spectacles and yelled out, “I have removed them! I have removed them! Tell me what happened?!” If he had said those words without running to her and holding her hands then it would have been good. No, it would have been much-much better, but there is cure for being a muscle head.

When Martha saw him holding her hands and saw how worried he looked, she melted. Yes, she literally melted. Well, at least she felt so. Then she heard him asking her what happened and her face turned beet red at that moment.

D’sue saw that until now she had only been acting weirdly, but now even her face was turning red. ‘Does she have a fever or something’ he thought. So to check whether his speculations were right or not he placed his hands on her head and found out that she really was burning. Her body temperature was so high that even his hand had started to warm up.

When she saw him touching her head she could help but shiver and her body started heating up gradually. She was still lost in her own thoughts like when he yelled, “Holy shit! You are burning up. When did you catch fever? Or is it cause if those goggles? Can these even apply status degrading effects on others?”

She couldn’t understand what he was babbling on about, but she knew what her condition was. It was no fever, but because she had absorbed high amount of fire elemental energies from the world. Because of this a few changes had occurred inside her body overtime and this high body temperature was one of them. This temperature that he was thinking as fever was actually her normal body temperature.

This was one of the benefits or for some people a curse, for trying to find strength by means not derived to be practiced by humans. Though she knew she was alright and nothing was wrong with her at all, but looking at the worried Knight in shining armor taking care of her a flower budded inside her heart.

She looked at the lenses in his hands and asked him,” What did you see through them.” She spoke in a way that would not give him any ideas to what she was thinking.

He looked into her eyes and saw that there was no mischief or greed in them. So, he told her the truth, “These lenses are amazing. Though they don’t work without the antennas, but with the help of these we will have no problem, traversing through these dark tunnels.”

“What? Why? How?” she completely forgot her worries. She suddenly stood up and with a shocked expression she questioned him. She even forgot for a second that these might hold the possibly harmful skill ‘x-ray’.

“I don’t know, I think these ants developed mana reception or something and used that to create artificial vision to see inside this dark cave. Though the view is very basic and not very detailed, but if someone uses it to see during night or in a complete dark place then these could become a completely necessary existence for him, like it is for us right now. But to think that ants could evolve to make best of their habitat, is quite amazing, isn’t it?”

“Hah, evolving? Don’t tell me you already forgot how crazy big that ant was, and how those mandibles…”Even the thought of those ants evolving to become even fiercer, made her shiver.

“Let’s forget it for now. We need to travel and meet with the other teams on the other side of the tunnel. So, we should start moving now.”

“Umm… can I also try it once, Please?” She looked at him with her big wide green eyes and spoke in a really lewd voice. She surprised him a bit with that ‘please, but he still didn’t lose his head over her cuteness.

“Yeah… sure, why not!” He spoke a bit awkwardly.

She still had her doubts and wanted to remove each and every inch of this doubt that had planted itself inside her heart. So, to do just that she then put on the lenses. But clearly it was not enough and she really had to put on those antennas.

 So she brought the antennas near her head and just like D’sue had told her, they extended and got attached on her head. She was scared at first and definitely was not going to put them on thinking that there might be some side effect of using them, but like he had told her, nothing happened.

 She looked through the lenses and what she saw really was more than she had imagined. Just like D’sue said she could see the walls, floor, roof almost every lightened with white color and dots of different colored lights everywhere.

She looked at him and saw that, other than of seeing a ball of light standing some distance away from her, she really could not see anything else. There were no details to his figure. ‘So he wasn’t lying to me, huh.’ She thought.

“Here these are good, but they put quite some strain on the mind. So, I don’t think I can use them.”

‘What?! So, if she could use them properly, then was she thinking of not returning them back to me?’ He thought while his lips twitched, but then he got his mind straight and spoke in a low voice, “yes you are right. I think there is a need to create an artifact out of them to increase their potential and to make them usable without such limitations. Or at least decrease the mental strain it put on its user.”

“Well, that’s that and this is this. We can’t really create anything out of them right now, so they would probably have to sit inside my sack till we get out of here. For now come here, I’ll give you a piggy back ride.” he said, being considerate about her fever.

She wanted to refuse cause she knew she had no fever or anything, but she couldn’t make her exited heart to calm down and silently nodded in approval to his suggestion.

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I have to something to inform everyone.

I am going to hold a Q&A discussion thread at the end of this mini arc (9 chapters are enough for a mini arc i think)

And this arc will end tomorrow.

Well, don't really except much happening there, but if any of you have any question that you want an answer for, then come and read it.

If you have any other questions to ask other than the ones that I will cover inside it, then don't behave like a shy kid and do ask me.

well, you can ask anything and everything that you want to...

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but that doesn't mean that I'll answer every one of them.