More Bodies Than Bullets (3/6)
After a few minutes of deliberation, the Queen finally figures out a way to climb up the side of the floating fortress.
The first problem with climbing up is that the walls are sheer, and there's nothing for her to grip. The only hand holds available are the other turret holes, but they're spaced out just enough so that she can't swing her arms across and get to the other side without falling to her death.
Another limiting factor is that she's only a Rehkin; she only has spirit magic, as well as her Named abilities in her Dra Rune which lets her make mana shields and energy blasts.
So, unlike a human (who have a large variety of magic techniques to use), the Queen can't just strengthen her body and leap up to the next turret hole.
So, how is she supposed to get across? The answer is simple.
She just has to get her Ants to occupy the other turret holes, then reach out with their egg laden arms. The Queen can then spawn some Ants from the chitin arms sticking out of the holes – all so that she can have some other Ants hanging onto the fortress just like herself.
Then, she can spawn a few more eggs until enough ants accumulate that they can latch onto each other and cover the side of the fortress like a big net. Once this is done, the Queen can finally climb up unhindered.
And so, the Queen does just that.
On her way up, she smiles in satisfaction at how she's not even being accosted right now; after all, the mana cannons can't hit her so long as she's hugging the walls.
She thinks everything is going smoothly… until the humans see a net of Ants trying to climb up the fortress. They then start pouring burning tar onto them from above, while others chuck rocks down with their spells.
Because of the Queen's absurd mana shield, none of these attacks actually hurt her, though the same can't be said for the Ants she's trying to use as footholds.
And so begins an annoying game where the humans try to destroy the "Ant nets," while the Queen constantly tries to spawn enough eggs for her swarm to reach higher.
Still, her ascension is all but guaranteed. Not even 5 minutes later, the is Queen hanging onto the edge of the floating fortress to avoid enemy fire, while thousands of eggs spawn every second and swarm towards the enemy's wall.
At last; she and her swarm is in open air; her people can finally spread out again and take full advantage of their numbers!
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The first thing the Queen does is have her children swarm the outermost wall and clear the place of defenders, as well as wreck all the mana cannons atop there. Given that every appliance in this fortress passively regenerates, she has to station a few thousand of her children near the cannons so they can be destroyed over and over again before they can fire on her forces once again.
Once the walls are finally clear, the Queen feels safe climbing up and taking a look at the rest of the fortress with her own eyes.
"Hmm…," she thinks, "I may have taken the outer wall, but there are 3 more major rings of walls until I reach the center of the Threshold. Between each towering wall is a winding city with narrow streets. The narrow streets will be hard to fight in, but it seems more manageable than the maze underneath."
She then looks closer at the walls and groans, "Why are there huge gaps in between each fortress wall?"
Indeed, each fortress walls reaches around 100 feet high – all set in a ringlike formation, with the World Gate in the center. In front of each wall is a large open space that drops all the way to the bottom; it's like each wall has a moat 100 feet across that has a bottomless chasm instead of water.
You'd think that since the fortress has a single base that there wouldn't be empty chasms in front of each wall. However, these chasms were artificially created with Spatial Bending magic.
Basically, the space in front of the walls was connected with the space at the bottom of the fortress; anything that touches the base of the walls will fall THROUGH the fortress and land back at the bottom of the cavern, where the Queen first emerged from.
Of course, the Queen immediately realizes that the only way for her troops to cross the huge chasms is for them to link arms and form bridges for the others to cross. Then, they can pile on top of each other to climb the walls.
With about 1/3 of a million Ants still trapped in the maze, and about 20,000 still forming the nets she used to climb up, the Queen still has several million Ants available to summon; that's more than enough to work with!
Breeching these walls may be difficult, but she knows she can do it!
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As a bit of a test run, the Queen sends a contingent of 70 thousand Ants into the winding city – just to see how the humans deal with it.
Once the Ants swarm into the streets, the humans take full advantage of the enclosed quarters and nature narrow streets to put up a good fight. She tries sending her ants atop the buildings to surround the defending mages, but she receives heavy casualties from the cannons atop the 2nd wall.
"Hmm…," the Queen thinks, "if I keep using that trick I learned in the maze, I could just have my children carry some eggs on them to break up the humans' tight formations in the narrow streets."
However, as soon as the Queen starts spawning the millions of children still waiting to be revived, she notices that the humans are suddenly pulling back to the second gate; it's like they already know that they'll just get uselessly killed if they stay in the streets.
The Queen has to concede the point; the human mages certainly WOULD be more useful up on the walls than in the streets.
Still, she'd like to kill and eat as many of them as possible before they manage to escape!
And so, her swarm scuttles uncontested through the outermost city as they relentlessly chase down the fleeing humans and ruthlessly tear them apart from behind.
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Once his troops are out of the way, Commander Fisco gives a command to his officer in charge of ballistics. "Sir Hemming," he orders, "I need you to switch the mana cannons from mana bolts to the tar bombs."
Moments later, Fisco looks through the mirror and sees huge sprays of burning liquid shooting out from atop the 2nd wall.
The mana bolts from before only fire in a straight line, and they have a simple (but effective) explosion. However, mana bolts are mostly ineffective on anything scuttling about in the narrow streets, since there isn't a clear line of fire.
Tar, however, isn't just pure energy; it has weight. Thus, these burning projectiles arc down. Because they arc downward, the cannon masters can aim the cannons upwards, then rain fire down from above onto the streets.
This way, the indestructible streets and houses won't be able to provide cover for the Ants as they make their way through the city.
What's even better about the tar bombs is that they continue to burn for several minutes after their initial impact. Since Fisco knows by now that none of these Ants have magically enhanced bodies (nor any physical based magic), they'll burn to death from a simple fire just as easily as a magicless human.
So, Fisco watches in satisfaction as the tar bombs pepper the city and coat the streets in fire. The smell of cooking meat permeates the entire cavern, the mournful cries of agony hiss from the Ants below.
Alas, this small victory doesn't last, since the Ants quickly begin to swarm through the lower city so quickly that his cannon masters can't possibly hit them all at once.
Even when Commander Fisco orders his men to aim to blanket the entire city in fire, the Ants use their own burning bodies to coat the floor – providing safe passage across the city by letting their sisters run across their backs.
Of course, Fisco knows very well that with so much empty space for the ants to spread out on, that his cannons won't be enough to completely halt them in their tracks now; he'll just have to hope it'll thin out their numbers enough for his soldiers atop the walls to hold their positions.
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It only take a few minutes for the Ant swarm to make it through the fire hailing from above and to the chasm in front of the second wall.
Once the Ants make it to the edge of the city, they start interlocking their legs and building a bridge across out of their own bodies. Thousands of ants have to be used for these simple bridges, because they need many sisters to get off the edge and make the bridge vertically thicker in order to support all their weight.
Without hesitation, about a tenth of the wall cannons switch back to mana bolts (since mana bolts fire a lot faster), and they start focusing their fire on the ant bridges – very quickly either burning them to ashes or knocking them back to the bottom of the cavern.
What's worse is that these bridges are so easy to aim at, since they're stationary things so close to the wall. What's EVEN worse is that because of the tar bombs carpeting the lower city in flame, few enough Ants are able to make it through to the chasm that the Queen's army isn't able to make too many bridges for the mana bolts to handle.
The queen frowns at this, since she doesn't know how long the enemy cannons can keep their munition. They're shredding through her forces with no sign of stopping.
After all, the Queen knows that the fortress traps are Time Locked, but she's unaware that the cannon ammunition is the same.
As far as the Queen is concerned, she can make the humans run out of ammo for their tar bombs and mana for their mana bolts. With the way she's throwing her endlessly reviving Ants at the walls, she's surely making them run out, right?
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After nearly an hour, one of the Queens' ant bridges finally connects to the other side just long enough for a single Ant to scuttle up the wall and reach the top. Of course, this poor creature is instantly slaughtered by the humans on the wall, but not before it collected valuable information for the Queen.
There, atop the wall, the Queen saw (vicariously through her daughter's eyes) that huge barrels were refilling with tar, and huge mana stones were gradually reforming on the mana cannons. This backwards motion is so oddly similar to the way the traps down below repaired themselves that the Queen finally realizes the truth.
"Sh#t!" she hisses angrily between her clenched mandibles. "I'll have to do it myself AGAIN!"
Carefully, the Queen makes her way through the city – careful to look like nothing more than a normal Ant; she doesn't want the enemy focus firing all their tar bombs at her and making her waste precious mana on shielding herself.
Sure, she has to shield herself every now and then from the accidental bomb hitting her, but she's otherwise uncontested as she makes her way across the city.