Seeing Ramtas moving into action, Paul hesitated, apparently pondering on whether he should send his metal robot out again. Sheyan reminded him with a few words.
“We can’t drag this fight out for too long.”
Paul soon realised that if they did not finish up soon, there may be a lot of trouble when the bunch of devious contestants rushed over.
So Paul gritted his teeth and once again dispatched his battle robot, whose core had been damaged, to stand in front of Aldaris as the second line of defence. By now, the ant queen, while roaring bitterly, had noticed Aldaris standing still in the distance. It instantly charged towards Aldaris hysterically. The queen’s attack this time lacked explosive speed, but it contained a breathtaking momentum, like an out-of-control locomotive!
The phantom of the Archon on her back started attacking even more fiercely. Almost every hit would send large lumps of the ant queen’s flesh flying. Terrifying white electricity flashed in the air. A smell of burnt flesh could be faintly detected.
Ramtas waved its staff and struck straight out, parrying the ant queen’s forelimb, but its inferiority in strength was immediately evident. It staggered back by a step, but then immediately swung the staff again. The heavy metallic head of the staff slammed down hard.
This blow was truly sinister and vicious, because Ramtas had chosen to attack the exact spot where the battle robot Heracles had previously struck the ant queen! The old wound once again suffered heavy damage. The shell instantly shattered, and a large amount of milky-white liquid, which looked like brain fluid, gushed out from the hole!
The queen wailed in agony, but the pain also gave it a burst of strength. Its two forelimbs fiercely pierced through Ramtas’ chest. It was about to tear Ramtas apart, but the seed of ‘Nature’s Grasp’ that was circling around Ramtas came into play. It exploded with a bang, and a large number of roots grew out of the ground to tie the queen down!
Although the effect of ‘Nature’s Grasp’ was instantly shaken off thanks to the ant queen’s abnormal strength, the short delay had enabled Ramtas to take a few steps back while forcibly enduring the intense pain to retreat out of the queen’s attack range.
Just as the queen was about to rush forward again, the battle robot moved in front of it and lifted its heavy, gigantic warhammer with a ruthless expression. An unforgettably painful memory immediately caused the queen to hesitate.
So by the time the ant queen once again sent Heracles flying, Aldaris had had enough time to spit out the last merciless syllable of his incantation from his lips! He floated off the ground as he placed both his hands on his chest, bowing deeply.
The next second, the Archon on the back of the ant queen abruptly retreated into the slim rapier like water being sucked into a whale, then suddenly exploded!!
White electricity splashed all over, spilling as far as six meters away. A huge, bloody hole over two meters wide and a metre deep was made in the body of the ant queen. Several major blood vessels were probably damaged in the explosion, causing a large amount of body fluid to fill the hole up almost instantaneously.
This was no doubt a fatal strike.
Paul finally made his move. He raised his hands high – a bizarre gesture, like he was surrendering. Coupled with Paul’s thin body, the sight even seemed a little ridiculous.
But suddenly, a sharp yellow light glowed on all ten of his fingers. Metal began to converge at his fingertips from all directions, forming ten tiny balls which slowly rotated!
Paul pointed all ten fingers at the distant ant queen. The ten metal balls on his fingertips abruptly shot forward at an astonishing speed like they were bullets. They accurately penetrated into the wound on the ant queen’s body. Then, the force bound to the metal balls exploded! Thousands of tiny metal shrapnels burst forth in the queen’s body, causing unimaginable damage.
After sustaining a series of heavy damage, the ant queen finally turned weak. It flew into a blind rage, but power without the support of reasoning and wisdom proved to be futile, especially without the explosive speed provided by the ant queen’s wings.
Although the trio of contestants were eager to finish the fight, they still decided to patiently nibble away at the tenacious life of the ant queen. It took nearly half an hour before the ant queen collapsed unwillingly amidst a sorrowful wail, accompanied by a gush of green liquid.
Sheyan now had a better assessment of this world’s creatures. That was to say, they really needed the collective strength of the group to live safely.
Take this One-Horned Flying Ant Queen for example. There were quite a lot of coincidental factors that had to happen for them to kill it.
First, the queen’s strongest ability was not in combat, but in reproduction. In fact, the most powerful combat force possessed by the One-Horned Flying Ant colony lay in their male ants. When the number of male ants exceeded ten, the terrifying venom they ejected could instantly reduce the enemy’s defence to a negative number, turning the enemy naked like a newborn baby. In that situation, each attack of the male ants on the enemy would cause higher actual damage than a previous explosive hit!!
Second, before the fight started, hunger had eroded away most of the queen’s stamina.
Third, the queen had bitten off a part of its body and had paid a heavy price to separate from the bulky egg sack.
Lastly, the ant queen fought with them outside her nest!
Considering these four factors, the battle ability of the ant queen was, objectively speaking, only 60% of its optimum state. Keep in mind that the ant queen was not even a creature specialising in combat, and it still caused so much trouble for the three contestants.
So, imagine how terrifying those creatures who occupied a territory on this planet by themselves must be?
In that instant, Sheyan could not help but recall the mysterious creature that tore the Ferocious Wolverine apart, the one which Ramtas felt an instinctive fear of!
After killing the ant queen, they went back to the nest to clean it up. The battle did not prove fruitless. Apart from several unknown mysterious items that could be exchanged for at least 30 achievement points in total, their biggest harvest was eight pieces of high-purity Pi ore. These high-purity Pi ore must have been discovered by worker ants when they dug underground, and because the ores contained a great amount of energy, they were stored away.
Of course, the corpse of the ant queen was also a valuable treasure. They left the cyborgs, who were proficient in these matters, to take care of it.
But while the contestants were performing a thorough search of the ant nest, an awkward thing occurred. Ramtas, who was seriously injured in the previous fight, was taken over by the gluttonous instinct of the wild boar and laid its hands (or, more precisely, its mouth) on the corpse of the ant queen.
The cyborgs obviously could not stop him, nor did they had any wish to do so. Sheyan expressed his deepest apologies regarding this incident. He consulted the off-line database of the cyborgs and marked down the price of several valuable organs of the ant queen on Galaxy E-Bay. He then renounced his claim on the unknown mysterious items and Pi ores.
Aldaris was allied with Sheyan, so he naturally would not fuss over these things. Meanwhile, Paul checked the prices Sheyan had jotted down and after doing some calculations in his mind, he realised that such a distribution method was actually slightly to his advantage, so he politely agreed.
He was now fully focused on his crushing extractor to see how much high-purity Pi elements he could obtain. In the Empire, high-purity Pi elements were hard currency, in the same way that gold was the most reliable asset in times of war and turmoil on Old Earth.
The corpse of the ant queen that was already half-eaten naturally fell to Sheyan. If he were to look at it only on surface value, he did make a loss by giving up the right to the rest of the loot in exchange for a corpse that would not drop any key – a loss of at least 10,000 utility points. But, in a way, Sheyan had obtained a huge benefit.
When Sheyan previously got near the ant queen, the liquid metal life-form had reacted, as if the queen had something it longed for. The reaction had reached its peak when Sheyan stabbed his saber into the ant queen’s body.
Besides that, Sheyan also sensed that Ramtas was very eager for the ant queen’s genes. Therefore, he would rather lose out a little to have the ant queen’s corpse in his possession. He was not worried that Ramtas’ gluttony would “damage” what the liquid metal life-form wanted, because the only things that could pique the liquid metal life-form’s interest were metallic materials.
After a bit of searching, Sheyan finally got what he wanted – a light-green stone growing in the ant queen’s brain. The metal content in the stone was quite high. It felt quite heavy in Sheyan’s hand. The liquid metal life-form quietly dissolved into a pool of silvery-white liquid, then wrapped the stone inside it.
A sudden crackling sound like something being fried in oil came from the inside. A large amount of impurities were then squeezed out. After that, Sheyan received these notifications from the nightmare imprint:
[ “Silver Mission Series hidden branch, Chapter 2: Injection” – Obtained important mission item, ‘Pineal Gland of the Ant Queen’. ]
[ Mission Note: The liquid metal enhanced life-form has absorbed some strange metal components which it feels will be of great help to its growth. ]
[ Hint: Your liquid metal enhanced life-form has grown. Mission completion rate has increased by 33%. Please continue your search for lacrimal stones or other similar items to increase the completion rate. The higher the completion rate, the better the reward you will get. ]
