Newfound Advantage (2/2)

All while the Queen is slaughtering his forces in the maze, Haalfrin keeps on getting reports about the Queen attacking them. But… why are these reports conflicting? How can she be in multiple places at once?

No… Maybe she's found a way to travel extremely quickly? Maybe she's found a way to make her Ants as powerful as herself? That would be terrifying.

Should he move forward and take the Threshold? Once she has no more safe place to stay in, they'll finally be able to bombard the Ants into oblivion from the Hall of Valor.

But… what if the Ants inside are just as powerful as the Queen? What if the Queen is tricking them, and she's really inside the walls, waiting for him to walk into her trap?

If so, then should he retreat instead and call this battle off? If he does that, then everything they've been preparing for would've been for naught.

Well, if he keeps on retreating every time things get a little unsure, he'll really never be able to finish up this war.

Unsure of what to do, Haalfrin steels his heart and looks to his generals, who had been shaken after hearing the reports. "Push forward! Be Quick! We don't have long before the Queen arrives again. I want you all to do as we planned."

Of course, part of the plan involved using the Time lock enchanters (Laura's team) to hopefully dismantle the Threshold. Long ago, these researchers had found a way to reverse the very spell that locks the stones in place and keeps them indestructible.

Well, these were the people who came up with this technology in the first place, so they were the people most suited for this task.

With the Time Lock spells undone on the Threshold, the entire thing will fall apart, and the Queen will be left with nowhere to go.

"Yes," Haalfrin thinks to himself as he hacks away at the Ants beside his men, "If we can manage to destroy the Threshold, then it might not matter if the Queen is here anyway. Even if she defeats all the Arkin here, the damage will have been done."

This is, of course, assuming that the Queen is willing to wait and pretend she isn't here, which is what a person setting a trap would do.

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(What he doesn't know is that the moment one of the Ants saw Haalfrin hop up on one of the walls, the Queen killed herself and revived back in the Threshold.)

Needless to say, nothing goes the way Haalfrin was hoping it would go.

From Haalfrin's point of view, one of the Ants at the forefront of the battle randomly bursts forth with power, and she grows a foot taller. Her skin becomes smoother, and her fingernails longer.

…She became exactly like the queen. How?

Without hesitating for a moment, the Queen in her new body immediately starts lashing out recklessly at everyone – destroying 10s of thousands of soldiers with every swipe.

Over the many years fighting the Arkin, the Queen had grown practiced enough in her attacks to put just enough heat in her strikes to kill the enemy but not reduce them to ashes; her swarm needed bodies to feast on, after all. Plus, conserving energy better than the enemy is the whole point of this war.

Kaalhyme was the captain closest to the Queen, so he shouts at his men with their established mental links, "She can't do 2 spells at once! While she's attacking, she can't defend!" His aim was to halt her attack and give the others time to retreat.

Sure, it's been well known by the Arkin for a long time now that the Queen can't use more than 1 spell at a time due to an injured soul.

They've always ruthlessly exploited this by having weak soldiers pepper her with small spells – effectively pinning her down and making her useless.

However… the Queen is behaving very strangely; she doesn't even stop her attacks to defend herself, and instead, laughs in pure aggressive joy as she keeps on slaughtering without any regard for her own life.

Needless to say, the Queen's body is incinerated effortlessly by the Arkin's "diversionary" attacks.

Kaalhyme is so flabbergasted that his mouth just hangs open, and he starts wondering if the Queen learned to cast illusion spells that can fool him. There's no way the war ended so suddenly, right?

He doesn't even have time to calm down before another burst of power comes from another Ant, who starts attacking the retreating Arkin in turn.

The Queen must realize that the Arkin are trying to do something to her fortress, so she's sure to blast apart any of the researchers who tried running into the fortress.

After this Queen is targeted down and slain again, another just raises in her place… This happens over and over again.

With the Arkin being unable to even make formations, Kaalhyme calls for an official retreat (though some were already running away).

Unfortunately, the Queen already has the Arkin army surrounded with her children. Whenever one contingent of Arkin almost break past the lines, the Queen revives into an Ant near there and starts butchering them.

With such practiced precision (for the Queen HAD been practicing with this power ever since she awakened the Name), the Arkin aren't even able to get away as they're surrounded, caught, and systematically slaughtered.

Of all the Arkin who came down from the Hall of Valor, only a thousand or so were able to get back to the safety of the lofty walls – far away from where the "teleporting" Ant Queen can get to them.

By far, this has been the most devastating loss the Arkin have ever suffered since the start of the war.

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"Ah…," the Queen groans in pleasure. She can feel the thick mana entering her soul. She'd never had so many demons to eat all at once… Just a single 5th Gate demon offers about as much mana as a 3rd horned dragon… so when you take into account that her swarm just ate over 400,000 demons in less than half an hour…

"3,349,234,393,344,437"

"3,349,593,394,333,998"

"3,350,002,558,874,102"

"…"

The numbers on her pendent speaks for itself. By far, she's more than made up for all the losses she's made over the years, as well as the 5 horned dragon's attack.

Realizing that she's been put in a winning position once again, the Queen is almost overcome with joy, but she slaps her cheeks. "No! I have to press the advantage! I've been preparing for the assault on their floating castle!"

"Yes. I know that the demons take several hours to reconstitute their bodies in the Death Realm… so with so few defenders in their castle, now is the best opportunity to attack!"

"I'll wipe them out once and for all!"

The Ants all sense their "mother's" anticipation, and they clatter their jaws and stamp their feet in excitement. All of them are newly revived, so none of them really understand what's making their mother so happy.

Whatever it is, if it makes their mom happy, then it makes them happy too.

Of course, their adventurous joy is blown to pieces the second they step out in the open on their march to the enemy's castle, and the mana cannons from the demon's stronghold start raining death upon them.

Alas, the Queen doesn't care about how her children are no longer excited to go to war. It isn't their suffering and fear that's reflected in her eyes; it's her objective up in the sky.

"GET MOVING!"

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"We got some reports from the invasion forces below," one of the Arkin generals says to his captains from atop the walls. "They said the Queen had completely eradicated our forces. We're down most of our men, and the Queen knows it. Alert the others. Tell them to prepare for an assault. I think she's coming."

This nameless general is correct to assume that the Queen is coming for them right now; it's the most logical thing she could do.

And so, the second the Ants peek their shiny black heads out, the cannons below the Hall of Valor start blasting away at the Ants.

"General!" one of the captains shouts over the tumultuous sound of cannon fire, "Look! The Ants are carrying things with them!"

The General uses a spell on his eyes to see better, and he looks to where his officer was pointing. There, he sees long lines of Ants carrying huge slabs of wood and long lines of boxes.

Using a scrying spell, it appears that those boxes are full of mana stones and premade spell circles written on parchment and rolled neatly up in tight compartments for transport.

"Where'd they get ahold of that?" the general wonders. "There wasn't anything like those spell scrolls in the Threshold…"

(What he hadn't considered is that the Queen had invented these spell scrolls herself, and she had several of her more long lived children spend their lives, generation after generation over these countless years, making these scrolls.)

(Now that the Queen has judged this to be the perfect opportunity, she's pulling out all of the cards she's hidden up her sleeves. It's no wonder that the Arkin up above are seeing her brings things out that they've never seen before.)

"Fire on those Ants bringing supplies with them!" the general roars an order. "Forget the other Ants who are trying to climb up!"

He has a bad feeling about… whatever the Ants are bringing with them.

Suddenly, the man's jaws drop when he looks down and sees the Ants assembling the countless logs into neat formations before using the spell scrolls to instantly transform them into functional… catapults!?

"WHEN DID THE ANTS LEARN HOW TO MAKE SIEGE EQUIPMENT!?"