A Means To Survival

The thing about the ant puppets is that:

1. They are basically living yet not, so they are almost zombies, yet they are alive, making them very strong and agile.

2. He only needs to give them a specific set of instructions, and they would follow it without stopping until they died. Although their consciousness was shattered, small fragments remain, and those fragments are what's making them work. The puppeteering ability allows the ant to "convince" them it's their own will and action, so they react as they do when eating, resting, or working normally.

Instead of following their natural instincts, the ant can tell them to "carry those stones and put them on those other stones," and they would do it. He would only need to use his soul tentacles when he wants to change their instructions or control them personally.

Basically, the ants guarding the entrance to his new hideout would attack and kill anything that gets too close to a certain perimeter of the entrance.

3. Lastly, he is able to send images and messages through the soul puppeteering, allowing him to communicate with his puppets remotely.

The ant, now somewhat of a necromancer, moved stealthily towards the ancestral nest with his puppet ant guards. The nest was currently under reconstruction by a massive group of hundreds of thousands of worker ants, supervised and protected by around one hundred soldier ants.

During the chaotic mess of reconstruction, the ant and his guards moved quickly and quietly, undisturbed. The ant constantly scanned his surroundings, using his soul gaze to its fullest potential.

"Found them," he thought with delight.

He led his guards towards a specific direction, and soon they arrived at their destination. Before them lay the still-fresh body of the false queen that had died defending the colony. The ant's eyes lit up with excitement at the perfectly preserved state of the corpse.

It was intriguing that the ants hadn't immediately dismantled the false queen's body. Was it an act of respect towards a fallen hero, or simply fear that kept them away? Could ants truly comprehend the concept of heroism, or was it something else at play?

"I'll have to take it easy, I see," he thought as he started controlling himself once more. Sending his puppets to carry the false queen's corpse, they quickly carried out his orders and started dragging it along.

But at that moment, something unexpected happened. A large flow of pheromones was released into the air, belonging to the queen, and she was not happy. Two false queens flew out from the hidden hole below the queen's bed, both flying straight towards the corpse of the false queen.

Seeing them speeding towards them, the ant quickly hid away, leaving his puppets behind. Upon arriving, both false queens didn't even take up to three seconds to rip the three puppet ants apart. Afterwards, both held a side and flew away with the corpse, back into the hidden place, and only then did the queen's fury die down entirely.

"They decided to take the queen now? Is it for feeding? I remember the queen only takes the purest honey and the most cleanest parts of special catches from raids, specifically only the queens of defeated colonies of other honey ant colonies or termite queens," he thought.

"This I've seen from my unconscious state and my conscious state alike, and during my short two weeks of life, I've seen her guards dragging over two termite queens and four honey ant queens into that cave."

"But the thing is, after a queen feeds enough, she would start laying eggs to start a new generation. But the queen hasn't laid any for the last few weeks, after my batch of drones," he thought with suspicion.

"Well, if I'm going to do that, I'll have to know as much as I can about the queen and her habits. After all, this queen seems to be a rare mutation, and it'll be hard for me to get close to her without damage done if I'm unlucky," he thought.

As he pondered, five tentacles arose from the sun-like soul and started splitting into many smaller pieces, connecting to ants in the surrounding area. Very quickly, he made twenty new soul puppets, making eight create a disturbance while the other twelve followed him quietly.

The supervisor soon discovered the ants causing the disturbance and attacked, joined by other ants, and started tearing the eight unconnected puppet ants to pieces. Far from them, the puppet master watched all this happen from his soul's gaze and was thankful he hadn't attracted more attention since gaining consciousness.

When he reached the bedside, right below the tower-like structure of the queen's bed, he found a hole large enough for the false queens to pass through. First, he sent forth seven soldier ant puppets, then he entered, and made the other five cover his back.

As they followed the tunnel, it started getting bigger the further they went. However, at a certain point, a large reddish "rock" blocked their way forward. The "rock" was large enough to block the entrance. The puppets wanted to push it, but he stopped them.

His reason? Well, what was blocking their entrance was a living being, not a rock.

Because he could see both soul, spirit, and mind with his soul gaze, he could directly see what it was at first sight. "Is that... a doorhead ant?" he thought, confusion evident in his mind.

Although he knew that this honey ant queen had somehow evolved intelligence and had been enslaving smaller colonies of other honey ants, he never thought she would be able to make other ant species follow her will. He was amazed.

"But I don't have time for this now," he thought seriously. He sent his soul force into the mind of the creature and partially wiped out its consciousness, then commanded it to move out of the way.

He had recently learned how to control how much of a creature's consciousness he would remove. Now, he could temporarily remove a creature's consciousness by injuring or weakening their mind. Alternatively, he could split the creature's mind into two and break one part, making the creature obey him without rendering it an idiot that would starve to death if not told to eat.

When the doorhead ant opened the passage to the tunnel behind, he and his puppets quickly fell into formation.