Natalya arrived shortly after the announcement.

She and Seven stood a few meters apart. In that darkness enveloped by the pungent smell of blood, both of them glowed faintly until the light fell apart, leaving only the silent gazes puncturing the air.

Seven so wished to know what kind of expression she had on her face right now.

The eerie sound of blood gushing out like a fountain made her unfathomable eyes look away for a moment, breaking the enchantment.

He couldn’t envision a better return.

-How did you get past the ants?

Seven threw the gourd of ant pheromones at her. The silence that followed afterward seemed to indicate she had more questions, but for some reason, she still chose to keep it to herself.

“Very characteristic”

He, too, was reluctant to trade words. Since he partially absorbed her personality by writing about her, there was a sort of connection between them that couldn’t be expressed with just words.

She returned his arm and went to see the body.

“I’ll have to scrape off the flesh later on for the crystal”

He strapped it to his side with rope recovered from the spear and went towards the crystal pile. Seven focused on his Human System and issued a “Looking for member” signal towards the crystals.

…

…

…

||Player “Anna Rosenheim” has accepted your Party request||

||Player “Inoue Akagami” has accepted your Party request||

||Player “Anna Rosenheim” has left the party||

A light flashed nearby and vanished instantly, whereas the other was so far away that only the general direction could be felt. Seven looked towards the place where the light had vanished – Natalya was right in front of it.

-The girl is dead – she muttered.

Seven nodded absent-mindedly.

-Where was she?

-Hiding nearby.

“That explains why she remained alive for so long...”

Seven took out a matchbox he had been saving for this moment, but felt awkward because he noticed it would be no easy task to light them.

“Argh... Whatever”

It wasn’t too dark that it was impossible to navigate, the Queen’s chamber was better illuminated than other parts of the cave, which made sense since he didn’t notice evolved eyes on normal ants, only she had a keen vision. Still, he wanted to check out the details of such an important room.

He grabbed a bunch of crystals and used them to inspect the surroundings.

There were broken eggs and pupa of many different sizes, most of which were two to four meters tall, the average size for worker ants and warrior wants, respectively. Aside from then, there were remains of human sized pupa.

They should’ve been the last ones hatched before the colony stopped bothering with this Queen. They didn’t take too much space compared to her body.

The body had toppled over, allowing for a very narrow passage through her lower parts. He gulped down his disgust and faced the wall while scrapping by her moistened belly, juices sticking to his suit while the blood already reached to his boots, soaking them.

Seven felt suffocated at many points, and the fear of never getting out of that hideous creature’s underside repulsed him as much as it urged him to go back, while contradictorily he also thought that even if he chose to go back, he wouldn’t be able to.

Was that the feeling of willingly walking into a trap?

“Like a moth drawn to the fire, I must seek out the light even if it burns me to death...”

His breathing was rough and his heart pumped blood at critical rates. Logic dictated that he should remain calm and go further – if it wasn’t for his brain, he wouldn’t even conceive entering such a hell – but if humans were so proficient in reason, there would be no need to delegate tasks to machines, much more talented at the language of logic.

It occurred to him that he never thought of suicide. No matter how despaired he felt, or the degree of emptiness that struck him, it didn’t even pass as a guest on his mind.

Now, however, it looked like an interesting development.

What would it be like to asphyxiate? To drown to death? To be choked, burned, hacked into pieces and left to slowly decompose?

He felt a morbid interest.

“Huh... The typical fascination towards death. I thought I had grown out of that when I read that philosophy book a few years ago. I have to write about it soon”

When he snapped out of these thoughts, he was already at the end of the cave and there was enough space to move around. Not much, however.

“Wait... This wall here is different”

The formation was completely different from the rocky cave. Inspecting it closer, he found out that one side was badly damaged.

“From the looks of it, it was because of the Queen moving...”

He had to squeeze in between the cave and the Queen, getting sticky all over his body.

-Argh!

He fell with a thud, almost dropping the bag of white liquid on the ground.

“Careful here...”

The soil was soft and moist, he walked on it for a long time before reaching the end.

“...”

“...”

“There’s no mistake... This is the blood river”

He couldn’t be sure since the first time he visited it was way too dark and he relied mostly on his sense of touch to figure out things, plus the Queen’s blood was stronger on him than the blood soaking the trail.

Seven had to walk back to confirm it, and it was undeniably the blood river.

Since he was already there, he chose to go back to the research station and start writing. He could go back to the Queen’s room afterward – Natalya had been there, anyways, he could try discussing things with her.

Thinking back to the blood, he seemed to put together a few pieces of the puzzle.

“That line of blood on the Queen’s belly must have been the level the blood river reached, so she was about half submerged in there. The ones who created the blood river must be the ants, but how did they do it?”

“...”

“...”

“... Inoue”

For someone’s crystal to appear beside the Queen who couldn’t digest them, it would mean that at some point they were captured. He couldn’t understand why, though, that they needed to create the blood river. Even if it was for nutrition, wouldn’t they have to feed the captives and bleed them? That seemed like a huge hassle considering how much blood you can milk from a human and how much food intake the Queen needs. Unless it was a delicacy of sorts.

“At least for now I can explain its existence, but next is... If that unnatural wall was built by the ants to obstruct the passage of the river, it would have been after exposure to the blood... So why did they stop it suddenly?”

“...”

“...”

“The worker ants didn’t touch the blood...”

“...”

“...”

“Poison?”

If it was poison, it would all make sense, it would explain why the Queen was abandoned in the first place – except for one thing.

“How was the blood river removed?”

With these thoughts, Seven disappeared back into the passage.

***

-Hey, someone else is coming.

-Shh, wait for me to recognize him.

Seven wore an absent-minded expression as the gate opened and he returned to the research center. The people whispering to each other in hiding didn’t come to his attention.

The bulky man in the shadows palled at the sight.

-It’s him, look at that arm...

-It’s decided then.

They waited patiently for him to reach the spot. Step by step, he had walked the exact path described on the plan – from the direction he went to the side he was on the open road.

“It’s only a cripple, we can do it”.

One step.

Two steps.

Three steps.

“...”

“...”

“...”

“Now!”

Three people popped out of nowhere and struck at Seven from different locations. Each one carried a weapon aimed at a vital spot.

Seven looked absent-minded to them, but in fact, he was thinking deeply about the information he had obtained, as well as the next few chapters of the story – his mind was keener than ever. So, when the trio appeared, he immediately ceased his thoughts and reacted.

The two weapons he had brought were used against the Queen and he hadn’t recovered them – he didn’t think he would need them. The only thing he had was the bag of gooey liquid stripped to his side.

He had shown Natalya the gourd of ant pheromones, but in actuality what he threw down was this very same liquid to confuse the ants.

“I did use the pheromones to get past them, but it’s impossible to walk past so many with just that... I would have to kill a few in my way”

However, he didn’t kill any. The white liquid was so strong that it eviscerated the ants’ sense of smell and let him walk unhindered. They looked so vulnerable that he wouldn’t have trouble killing them, but he preferred not to play too risky.

After all, they still had a sense of touch.

He threw it without a single moment of hesitation towards the closest opponent, immediately his mood becoming foul.

“I just lost an important clue thanks to this mess... Tsk, what a waste”

The one who saw the bag coming his way tried to slash it in half with his sword. The leather skin wasn’t too thick and tore open, covering his torso and face entirely.

Taking the opportunity, Seven fled the scene in a hurry and the other two couldn’t keep up with him running away.

Giving one last look towards the back, Seven was shocked to discover that the person whom he threw the bag at was gone, only a sizzling puddle of pink liquid was left behind, his limbs gradually decaying into nothing.

Also, he recognized one of the attackers.

Nathan.

They were so confident in the ambush that they completely disregarded the bare minimum of covering their faces. But Seven didn’t have time to think about petty attempts at his life, what he gained from this encounter completely covered his losses.

It all started to make sense, he couldn’t believe how quickly his questions had been answered. He found a plausible theory.

“The liquid is a kind of corrosive acid capable of completely melting a human and mixing with the blood. A significant amount must have been dumped at the river, or a smaller amount near the entrance to the Queen’s chamber. It didn’t kill her, but severely damaged or affected a vital organ... If that’s the case, she must have tried to build the wall herself by taking away earth from the bottom side of the river, it would repeatedly fail to do so, but would gather enough time for other ants to help her”

Yes, the Queen couldn’t have done it alone, which meant at least some of the ants were immune to the poison.

“The warrior ants were attracted to it, most likely they are immune and treat it as food, maybe... But why would a warrior go out of its way to specifically procure this liquid in that big of a city?”

“...”

“...”

“...”

“... It not only treats it as food, but it also recognizes it as a threat and tries to eliminate it.”

There were two possibilities in his mind:

The first one, they drank all the blood, but it would require a large army of ants to do it in only six hours. This theory clashed with the fact there were few ants active in this territory.

The second one, they transported the blood somewhere safe. It was more plausible than the first theory, but Seven still didn’t believe that they drained the river that fast just like that.

"…"

“...”

“Of course... If they built a dam to block the access to the Queen, couldn’t they just break a few walls to drain the river and later go to these locations to feed on?”

Seven tsked.

“Somehow, this doesn’t seem right... How frustrating”

By the time he had finished his thoughts, he was back at the dormitory. All of his questions and worries disappeared as he saw the familiar sight of ink and paper.

Seven breathed out a sigh of relief.

Smiling to himself, he picked up the book and started to write almost instinctively.

The new chapters of his story would reflect the highest and lowest points of his adventure: from fighting to near death alongside Natalya, his unapproachable main character, to finding himself with suicidal thoughts at the depths of the Queen’s chamber, and almost inside the thing itself.

After what he witnessed, vivid descriptions of a hell that rivaled Dante’s came to flourish with more disturbing sights of creatures that humans shouldn’t dare imagine, lest they lose their sanity. Seven was committed to create something that no one would be able to finish without having a slice of their conscience taken away, brutalized and unable to heal into a scab.

And in the middle of all of that, Natalya.

She was not the light in the dark. In his story, she was darkness itself.

Whenever she appeared, the story would take a step up to implant hope in one’s heart, but leaving it without care, a seed whose fate was to never sprout into a whole being. She was both the bird that scattered it in the wind and who later on found it and ate it.

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you...”

The famous words of Nietzche perfectly described the sentiment that would be implanted in the audience. But did they know? Seven as an author only wished for an interesting story, not for them to learn anything. How it impacted the viewer was only a small detail, a courtesy he made from considering that Ai and possibly someone else would read his work.

And for that, he impregnated the book with the concept of accepting all this hell, entering the stage of a pupa and breaking out of the shell reborn as something else entirely.

“Figuratively or literally, whatever the case... Become a monster.”

||Invasion end||

||Objective completed||

||Territories claimed: 2||

||Contribution Ranking||

||Natalya Wolskev – 1st (47,38%) // 8670 points||

||Seven – 2nd (16,39%) // 3000 points||

||Kyel Prajna – 3rd (4,21%) // 770 points||

||Meritorious Deeds||

||Natalya Wolskev – Slay the Queen (3rd Territory)||

||Seven – Slay the Queen (1st Territory)||

||Catherine Wyz – Research Lab Discovered||