There were... so many bugs. Beetles, worms, ants, spiders, all inside of me. Throw in some yeast, tapeworms, and being unloved, and this was literally my worst nightmare. It was so shocking that I almost forgot my hunger for a moment.

I pushed at one of the grosser spiders with my mind and it moved. Nearly an inch. Oh thank god, I have a way to deal with this. I started pushing the bugs toward the walls, trying to get them out of me. While I pushed, a particularly squishy looking bug got caught on a rock and well, squished. The bug began to dissolve into the rock and dirt that made up my boundaries. Suddenly I felt a tiny bit grosser, and, more importantly, a tiny bit less hungry.

Holy crap, bugs count! I yelled as I looked at my mana bar which now read [9.01/100 MANA] instead of 9. I also noticed that my Dungeon Points had risen in step with my mana to [0.01 DP]

Yeah, and look what else; we got the greatest dopamine inducer know to mankind.

Ooh, a notification!

The screen which had popped up in front of me read [ENEMY DEFEATED – ANT LARVA – LEAST CREATURE – OBTAINED 0.01 DP, 0.01 MANA – TOTAL ENEMIES DEFEATED: LEAST CREATURES: 1]

Nice we both replied at the same time. I immediately got down to the business of satiating my hunger and building up Dungeon Points.

Surprisingly, without tastebuds, bugs didn’t taste all that bad. A bit lemony. Some of the more thoraxy ones had a satisfying crunch like potato chips. It turned out to be fun to notice the variance of flavor profiles in the mana I was absorbing.

Great, our first day on a new world and already we’re bug eating weirdos.

A few of the assorted creepy crawlies had a texture that reminded me of mushrooms. If I could just find an insect or anthropod that tasted like garlic, I’d be set. Maybe a chicken flavored one, some zucchini flavored beetles, a squash flavored moth, a few salt and pepper mosquitos... Ok, clearly, I was still hungry.

Ninety-one meters by ninety-one meters was a LOT of space. Eight-thousand two-hundred and eighty-one square meters of it, to be exact. Bigger than any house I’d ever lived in. Even with only enough strength to kill one bug at a time – I’d found that my manipulation abilities extended to lifting and dropping things such as my newly trusty rock – it turns out that if you just keep squishin’, you just keep – Ooh, a title!

[TITLE AQUIRED – KILLER OF ANTS – REQUIREMENTS: KILL 1000 ANTS – AWARDING 10 BONUS DUNGEON POINTS – UNLOCKED ABILITY: SUMMON ANT-TYPE CREATURES]

Dude! I didn’t bother replying as I immediately summoned the menu and opened the brand new [SUMMON MONSTER] panel. I was presented with three options:

[SUMMON QUEEN ANT – 2 DP]

[SUMMON SOLDIER ANT – 0.01 DP]

[SUMMON WORKER ANT – 0.002 DP]

As I’d only killed 1896 least creatures so far, I got back to squashing bugs with a vengeance in order to save up enough points to start my own personal tiny army.

Meanwhile, my human half had been walking the entire time I’d been squishing bugs, minus, of course, a few minutes spent selecting a sturdy walking stick, and collecting a pocketful of bashin’ rocks to go along with the walkin’/beatin’ stick.

I looked around myself vigilantly as I moved toward the village in the distance. Remember that time when my best friend, brother, and I were planning to buy brass knuckles and baseball bats and go stand in a filed in the middle of the night and hope that a pack of coyotes would attack? Oh yeah, that would have been super fun. You never know who you really are until you’ve faced down a slavering pack of midnight coyotes. Midnight coyotes the band? That’s a band name? I mean, it’s almost got to be. Fair enough. I nodded my head to myselves.

Are you more scared or excited about actually having to fight the ‘coyotes’ of this world? I like how you put scared first. That says a lot about your thoughts on the matter.

I walked in silence for a few minutes before I spoke again. So what’s your bet? What do you mean? For random encounters on the way to the town. Giant rats, slimes, magicarps? Personally, my money is on horned rabbits. Well, this is a pretty idyllic area, so we might not find anything at all.

Regardless of the potential for idyllicism, I remained on guard with my stick and a rock at the ready, but not a single beginner monster attacked me. I did see a butterfly though.

I crushed a butterfly with a rock. Well, a caterpillar. Maybe a grub or something, why would a caterpillar be in a ninety-one by ninety-one-meter hole in the middle of the ground? My human half had squished a couple of ants as an experiment but got nothing from the attempt, so the above-ground butterfly remained in safety. The grub/whatever-it-was however prompted a pop-up notification which made me grin like an idiot.

[ENEMY DEFEATED – GRUB – AWARDED 0.01 DP, 0.01 MANA – TOTAL ENEMIES DEFEATED: LESSER INSECTS: 148 – LEAST INSECTS: 1760]

I’d reached enough Dungeon Points to summon an ant queen twenty minutes ago, but now I had enough points to also summon a dozen soldiers and seventy worker ants. I couldn’t remember what kind of ratio an ant colony had. My childhood ant-farming experience clearly failing me. I figured that this would do for a start though. I pulled up the summoning menu and excitedly selected that soldier ant option.

[SUMMON SOLDIER ANT – QUANTITY?]

I selected twelve.

[WOULD YOU LIKE TO SUMMON TWELVE SOLDIER ANTS? – Y/N]

I clicked on Y and my mana sensing lit up with a blue glowing circle. I moved my perception around my room and the blue circle moved to wherever I “looked”. I found an empty spot which I'd already cleared of wild bugs and summoned my soldiers.

Twelve glowing blue ants expanded into existence inside the circle. As the glow faded, I could feel a connection with these little creatures that I hadn’t expected. They didn’t talk to me, but I could feel them asking me for orders. I told them to guard the area, at which time another notification popped up.

[ABILITY LEARNED – CONTROL LEAST INSECT – LEVEL 1]

I clicked on the ability in the menu and got the following explanation of the skill:

[CONTROL LEAST INSECT – TAKE CONTROL OVER ANY LEAST INSECT – 0.01 MANA PER INSECT PER MINUTE – MAXIMUM OF 100 INSECTS AT ONE TIME]

Cool, we regain ten mana a minute, so right now we can easily make an army of a hundred elite super bugs to lay waste to all of the other gross bugs inside of you. Ooh, and we can take any of the bugs that put up a good fight and absorb them into our legion of invertebrate doom!

After a bit of experimentation, we discovered that the ants we’d summoned didn’t take any of the one-hundred slots, so we would be able to create the one-hundred bug legion in addition to our eventual ant army.

I summoned the ant queen and seventy worker ants and tasked them with building a colony and fulfilling my newest lifelong dream. Creating the greatest army the South-Eastern corner of my room had ever seen!