Cat and Mouse (1/2)

A few minutes later, Haalfrin is sweating now with how hard he's concentrating. The mana sensitive ink on the Painting is so sensitive to his magical touch that it immediately wants to warp and bend the moment he touches it; it WOULD be quite bad if he messed the painting up this way.

Still, with a bit of careful handling, Haalfrin slowly moves the ink making up the man's arm over to the doorknob, and he carefully twists the man's wrists until the doorknob turns, and the door is free to swing open.

Having the door open is actually hard, since he can't just move the brown paint out of the way as it swings open. From a 2D point of view, the door is getting thinner, after all.

So, Haalfrin has to squeeze the door's paint together VERY carefully. If he does it too quickly, the brown paint will spill over and ruin the painting around it. If he does it too slowly, he'll waste the time he's bought having the Wills distract the Queen.

Still, after getting tips from Fisco every now and then, Haalfrin eventually succeeds.

What surprises Haalfrin is that once the door's paint is peeled away… there's another image painted there; it's the image of a flickering brown gem.

"Touch the part of the painting with the brown gem on it," Fisco says, "That's the Master Key."

"Really?" Haalfrin laughs – this time not in a mocking tone – as the brown gem the size of his fist appears in his outstretched hand. "That's actually a pretty cool way to hide something."

Knowing he doesn't have much time to waste, Haalfrin runs back out of the halls and makes it to open air.

Sure, he has to cut down many Ants along the way, but so long as the Queen isn't personally there, he'll just count it as free Death Aura.

As Haalfrin runs along, he's sure to grip the brown key tightly. "Fisco," he asks, "what EXACTLY does the Master Key do?"

"It has 4 main subfunctions," Fisco explains. "One for the cannons, one to Time Reset the traps and munition, one that lets you remotely control the walls & traps inside the basement maze, and the final one that controls the surveillance enchantments – lets you keep an eye on things."

"Hm…," Haalfrin muses, "That last one's good. Having access to the Threshold's surveillance magic will make it easy to keep track of where the Queen is so I can avoid her more easily."

After thinking about it some more, Haalfrin adds, "I can also lure many Ants into the basement maze and use the traps to get a lot of free kills. Since the Queen doesn't lose anything by letting her Ants die, and because she doesn't understand how I get more powerful with Death Aura, she probably won't think much of sending countless Ants to their Deaths down there. I can use those traps over and over again!"

Every now and then, Haalfrin comes across his weapon Wills barricading a hallway here and sweeping through a hallway there as if on patrol. He only told them to kill Ants and patrol through the inner fortress, so coming across them is quite random.

While Haalfrin is running through the halls, he notices that with space bent so expertly in this place, the hallways always lead to strange, unintuitive places.

"Fisco!" Haalfrin sighs, "Is there a way I can control where the hallways lead me with this Key?"

"I'm afraid not," comes the former Commander's reply, "The space warping enchantments are locked in place here. You'd just have to memorize the layout… There's a map of the layout inside the Master key…"

"But I don't have time to study it."

"…I'm afraid I don't have it memorized either," Fisco admits, "so I can't help you navigate this place on the fly."

Fisco does think about it for a moment longer before replying, "What about the basement maze? The routes of the maze are designed to be controlled by the Master Key. Plus, all the Walls are space locked, so the Queen can't break them down."

"What, the routes?" Haalfrin exclaims, "How can the maze's layout change if the place is Time Locked?"

Fisco sighs at this, "There's no time! I can explain if you survive. Just keep moving!"

Haalfrin nods. "Got it." He knows full well that if the basement maze can be rearranged, then it'll be a GREAT place to hide in case the Queen is getting particularly close.

---------------------

When Haalfrin gets back to the winding hallways that the Commander's office is tucked behind, he sees his weapon Wills holding their own at another choke point, and he wonders aloud, "I've seen these same Wills here holding the same spot. I'd have thought the Queen would have come here by now and barged through…"

What he hadn't considered is that with him being the only human left in the fortress, the Ant Queen actually thinks that all these "floating weapons" are just another security feature of the fortress.

With this misunderstanding in mind, she didn't come down here herself to destroy them. I mean, she thinks there's no meat on the other side, since she didn't really see where Haalfrin went.

Anyway, Haalfrin sits and watches for a moment to see how the Wills are doing… and they're doing so well that it's actually a little scary.

Since the Wills have no conventional bodies, they can wedge themselves together in VERY tight formations. For example, a hall that could fit 3 men across with shields and spears can, instead, be completely covered with scores of shields and spears tucked in between.

The killing power is multiplied so many times that even Haalfrin is sure they could rip him to shreds if he didn't have his Dra Name to strengthen his body.

Obviously, if Haalfrin would get minced to pieces, the common Ants don't stand a chance. Watching the Ants walk into what is effectively a meat grinder is actually a little painful to watch…

With the Ants dying at such an astronomical rate, Death Aura is constantly being released from their corpses. At this rate, Haalfrin can use his Fel Name to constantly supply them with mana.

"Oh," he slaps himself on the forehead, "I forgot that it's the Will who has a mana pool – not the weapon. When a Will gets low on mana, they'll just relinquish their steel body to another, fresher Will. Then, the depleted Will can just passively regenerate their mana before being sent out to fight again."

By now, Haalfrin has several hundreds of thousands of Wills attached to his soul, yet only a few hundred thousand weapons lying around in this fortress; this strategy of swapping Wills to keep them fighting is actually feasible.

The only reason the Wills wouldn't be able to fight indefinitely is because their steel bodies will eventually break.

So, Haalfrin closes his eyes and gives an order to all his Wills, "If your body is getting close to breaking, come to me and drop the steel body off." He needs to send them to Fisco for repairs, after all. "Until I can find a steady way to repair your bodies, be careful!"

With that out of the way, Haalfrin continues running to where he needs to go.

Once Haalfrin gets outside to the open cavern, he flies up to the ceiling and uses an adhesive spell to stick himself to the top; this is far less mana expensive than keeping his levitation spell going.

And so, Haalfrin meditates upside down while he feels how his Wills are doing…

What Haalfrin assumes is several hours pass by steadily. Constantly, he feels his Wills fighting, fighting, fighting. It just never ends.

Since the Wills are able to communicate with each other in ways Haalfrin can't, they have a network similar to the Queen's hivemind. Once the Queen is spotting by one Will, that soldier will report to the others, and everyone will know where she is, so that they can avoid her.

So long as the Wills can keep away from the Boss Ant, they can kill to their heart's content.

"Hmm…," Haalfrin muses, "I never really thought about it before since I've never been in such a drawn out battle before… but my Wills DO have to regenerate their Mana while they're inside my Soul Realm. That means they have to take it from my mana pool."

The reason this has never been a problem before is because he's always had so many Wills that they could just rotate between each other – hence, his army would effectively never run out of mana.

However, since the Wills are all rotating constantly and without rest, Haalfrin realizes that he'll have to constantly supply them with mana – potentially for years! There's no way he can keep up with that normally!

Luckily, his Wills seem to be killing Ants effectively enough so that he's still getting more Death Aura than he has to spend keeping them functional and full of mana with his Fel Name.

---------------------

While Haalfrin passively observes the battle and waits for a moment he's needed, Kaalhyme is pulling most of the weight here. As the de facto General of the Wills, his mind is working at triple speed as he keeps up with everything that's going on in the fortress.

Knowing full well their need for efficiency in this battle of attrition, Kaalhyme notices that his army is expending so much mana in their killing spree that even their past strategy of switching the tired Wills out with the fresh Wills won't work forever.

In other words, the total mana expenditure is greater than the aggregate mana regeneration across the entire army.

Realizing this flaw in their plan, Kaalhyme orders his soldiers to split all their groups in half; what's the point of having 100 Wills for a single hallway when 50 would do just as well?

Plus, with so many Wills packed so closely together, a lot of mana is being wasted whenever a Squad of Wills overwhelms the Ants so bad that each "enemy soldier" falls dead with 10 or 20 fatal wounds; isn't 1 fatal wound enough?

At the same time, Kaalhyme knows how important it is to control territory in this battle, so he's sure to not spread his army TOO thin. A little overkill is fine so long as his formation lines remain firm and unbreachable.

After only a few hours, Kaalhyme nods in satisfaction after noticing that his army's mana stockpile is slowly growing larger, rather than shrinking.