Retreat (2/2)

"Reri!" Raru is constantly calling out for his sister through their soul link (since they ARE Contracted by the soul). "Where are you!?"

"H…here…," comes a weak reply.

"Reri!? Why do you sound so weak?"

*COUGH* "Just come pick me up outside this accursed basement," Reri's voice suddenly gets annoyed. "I want to get out of here."

Once Raru gets to the top, he sees… a minurature version of his sister hiding on top of one of the houses. By "miniature", I mean that she's only a tiny dwarf that can fit on the palm of your hand.

"Ah!" Raru cries out in alarm, "Girl! Why're you in your soul form! What happened to your body!?" She's also been sucked dry of mana.

Reri looks aside in shame. "Never mind that. Let's just get out of here. We can grow my body back later."

Indeed, despite being eaten alive, Reri can't die; as a Death god, she's already died once, after all. Instead, when a dead person dies, they revert to their soul form, and their bodies slowly regenerate once again.

Breathing in slowly to suppress his anger, Raru look down and thinks of Haalfrin. "Did the human hurt you before I came down there?"

"No."

"Who was it then?" he demands.

Reri knows full well that if she gives her brother a target, then he'll completely lose rationality and pursue a futile revenge. Thus, she knows what she has to do here.

So, Reri looks away. "I'm not telling. JUST GET US OUT OF HERE!"

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

Surprisingly, it's actually rather hard for the Queen to get a drop of the dragon slayer's blood. With her own children's blood permanently stained on the hallways, and fresh blood always being added, the dragon slayer's blood would be lost in the river, even if she DID manage to make him bleed.

… And that's precisely the other problem with her plan; her enemy's skin is as hard as a 4 horned dragon's scales (at least). There's no way any of her children are biting past his defenses.

Thus, the Queen realizes that getting a drop of her foe's blood is unrealistic.

If it were before, the Queen would've thrown a tantrum and lashed out in the battle irrationally after her plans are thwarted again. However these past 3 years has been one long train of nothing going the way she wants it to go; she's long learned to at least keep her frustration in check.

So, instead of freaking out, the Queen spends a bit longer coming up with another solution.

"What about the strange black Aura?" she wonders. "That Aura is tied to the dragon slayer's power. What if I just measure the Aura?"

A few seconds later. "Aha! It works!" her excited hiss echoes through the halls.

In her mind, numbers are constantly streaming and changing every second.

"100,348,992"

"100,349,022"

"100,349,034"

"etc."

The Queen spends a few seconds comparing her own mana to the other man's Aura. "My numbers are about 20 times as big as his. My numbers are growing about 200-ish every second, while the human's is growing about 20-ish every second. Hmm…"

At face value, this feels like it's supposed to be good news… but it doesn't make the Queen very happy. The reason for this is simple. She knows that her pendent is reading 2 very different types of energy here – her mana, and his Aura.

The problem with this is that she doesn't really know if his lower numbers makes him stronger than her or not. It's like reading "100 miles" and "10,000 feet". Sure, one number is bigger, but the Queen doesn't know how to compare those 2 numbers.

At last, she puts her mind at ease when she realizes something. "The human wouldn't be taking such special care to run away from me if he were stronger than me."

It's a little disappointing that her new toy pendant won't be any more than a reference, but it's best to be grateful for what you have, right?

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

As time goes on, Fisco's lessons on the Master Key gets more and more in depth. Pretty soon, Haalfrin (and Kalastros) are getting better and better at manipulating the traps in their favor.

Sure, it's easy to set off ALL the traps in the maze at once, but that's hardly useful, since he'd be harming his own soldiers as well. The trick is to figure out how to manually activate the traps in individual sectors.

As the years tick by, the Kalastros and some of the other Wills master the Key so thoroughly that this starts to give a serious advantage to Kaalhyme.

What Kaalhyme ends up doing is having Kalastros use the Key to reset the traps in all the territory they have. (After all, resetting traps in areas that are completely occupied by the Ants is folly, since the Ants will see it happening and rip the traps apart as they're reforming.)

Then, he'll sometimes tactically withdraw his forces as they constantly move about to avoid the Queen. When the Ants swarm in to take the newly acquired land, they always end up paying dearly with many lives.

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

The day Kaalhyme and Kalastros start using the traps effectively, the Queen starts seeing concerning numbers pop up on her stolen pendent.

Her numbers read:

"202,401,002,999"

"202,401,003,098"

"202,401,003,201"

"…"

His numbers read:

"8,293,957,002"

"8,293,957,134"

"8,293,957,392"

"…"

She averages out their growing numbers, and she realizes something. "He's growing at about 100 numbers a second now instead of 20. I'm growing at…less than 200 now. I'm growing less quickly, and his growth has shot up by about 5 times."

No doubt, this is because the enemy has started using the traps effectively. With so many of her children being slain at no expense to the human and his forces, it only makes sense that her children would eat a little less, and his steel spirits would kill a little more.

"Ugh," the Queen spits in disgust as she thinks, "I can't keep fighting in these tunnels. At this rate, he'll just get stronger and stronger – up until I can't compete with him anymore."

And so, being unable to properly concentrate while she's fighting, the Queen pauses her killing spree, and she abruptly sits down to meditate.

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

She doesn't know how long she sat there, unmoving, but eventually, even her children are getting restless.

"Mom!" one of the Ants calls out, "It's past time! When are you going to help us against the evil steel soldiers?" All of her children are getting anxious right now, since they're used to having a strong force to back them up.

"I'm busy!" the Queen hisses at them.

"Whyyyy?!" one of her other children whines.

"Ugh," the Queen groans as she scoots one of the smaller ones away. "Just go play with the steel enemies while mommy thinks of something."

Sometimes, her children are truly annoying. You'd think, after so many years spent fighting and being revived, that they'd grow up a little in the head. However, each Ant is reborn without memories of their former lives.

Hence, each Ant is truly a newborn child on the inside; they know nothing of life outside this bloody maze.

Sure, the Queen chose to withhold their memories, since her soldiers would be rather ineffective if they go completely mad by the trauma from being slaughtered and gutted over and over again.

However, it's still annoying that they're stuck in a perpetual state of childhood because of this. Why can't they just back off and NOT demand her attention every second!?

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

Realizing that she's slowly inching towards defeat at this rate, the Queen has an unprecedented sense of crisis.

Feeling a sense of helplessness, the Queen fails over and over again to think of a plausible scenario where her people could avoid being killed by the traps. However, the traps are impossible to notice when they're already prepared beforehand! Plus, it's not like the Queen herself can be everywhere at once to stop the enemy from constantly moving through the maze and opening up new territory in the halls.

At last, the Queen comes to a realization. She looks up at where she knows the exit is. "Time for a change of plans."

Then, she telepathically hollers to her entire army. "We're moving out! Follow the sisters in front of you to the maze's exit, and don't separate yourselves!"

Her order confuses all of her children; why would they leave now? Having such short memories, all of them truly believe that killing in the maze is the meaning of their entire existence. Leaving now is… scary!

Still, given their strong spiritual link with their "mother", they all believe that the Queen knows best.

So, they all slowly shuffle out of the maze in an organized fashion – with the ones on the outermost sections carefully scooting back in their typical wall formations, so that the enemy steel spirits won't be able to get quite so many kills from their retreating ranks.

Within a few hours, the entire maze is vacated of Ants, and the halls grow still.

The Queen realizes that neither the dragon slayer, his dragon bone spirit weapon, nor his steel army come to chase her forces outside the maze.

Seeing her enemy's reluctance to leave, the Queen isn't surprised. "If I were in their place, I wouldn't want to leave either; it's the place of my biggest advantage. Plus, I'd be confused about what I was planning. I'd want to take it slow and avoid walking into a trap."

And so, an eerie silence overtakes the Threshold as both the Ants and the steel army warily watch each other from their own defensible positions.