NOVEL NEXT Chapter 86 – Mech-AccordPotioneer
In an extremely vast underground chamber connected with countless numbers of holes and passageways each enough to fit a truck, a woman with straight, shoulder-length orange hair is engaging in a battle against a giant ant. From a glance, the unique feature of this woman would be her pair of orange-red hexagonal eyes.
She is currently wearing thick leather armor laced with metal and machinery. The backpack on her back was huge, almost half the size as her and there’s eight human spine-like mechanical tentacles extending from it. Each of her mechanical appendages seemed to be self-aware, they are dismantling the corpse of a soldier ant that she killed deftly.
The woman touched her chin while the eight mechanical tentacles were harvesting the precious parts of the ant. “According to her habits, Katsuki should arrive right about now but she said she’s fetching a new member. If they are waiting for the exact departure time instead of their early habits, the team will be 30 minute late. Tsk… just when I was lucky enough to encounter a young Formic Hive Queen…”
She gazed at the sea of giant ants in the dark underground chamber.
She is currently being surrounded by ants, but they acted as if they could not see her. The primary units within the ant swarm are the soldier ants which are as big as a horse. These black soldier ants have thick black carapace that could block most sharp and piercing attacks, the ability to spit formic acid and sharp pincers that could break most mortal weapons.
Fortunately, she’s protected under a stealth potion. Killing one and dismantling its corpse wouldn’t attract too much of their attention as long as she does not bother with the swarm’s consciousness.
“The Slayer Ants will come soon and the stealth potion shouldn’t be able to fool them…” She glanced at the sea of ants and sighed in disappointment. “I was this close…” In her tunnel vision, she’s looking at a large-class young ant queen being moved together with a large amount of white eggs by a smaller type of rank 0 ants called worker ants. Soon enough, the young queen and eggs disappeared from her sight.
The orange-haired woman shook her head as she took out a vial of potion containing transparent liquid. She opened up the bottle and smeared the content on top of her person. “This should last 10 more minutes. Enough for me to leave…” Just as such thoughts crossed her mind, she felt the attention of the ant soldiers focused on her.
“Damn, there's an elite rank 2 ant soldier...” She took out various potions from her dimensional storage and doused herself in various liquids. As more potions drenched her person, she felt the attention of the soldier ants started to pry away from her, but there was one consistent ant who kept its attention on her.
It was the rank 2 soldier ant.
This particular ant has a thicker carapace and additional limbs like that of a mantis blade. Different from other rank 1 soldier ants, this one possessed an additional pair of black beady eyes to see better. The stealth potions might be able to distort signal waves, erase scent and block the perception of most of the ants, but it'll take more than that to hide from this rank 2 soldier ant.
Before she could take out another potion, the rank 2 ant roared silently while excreting some pheromones, causing the attention of the soldier ants to return to her.
“Fuck…” She quickly used her tentacle arms to get away. There are probably thousands or tens of thousands of ants in this colony. She wouldn’t be able to get away even if she engage in a battle and killed 1% of them. Yet, the problem remains with the rank 2 soldier ant.
Through their mental network and hormonal discharge, the ants are capable of sharing information near-instantly. Thus, despite the only one who can detect her is the rank 2 ant, it was able to spread its vision towards the rank 1 soldier ants.
While retreating towards the path of least resistance, the woman took out various potions and threw them at the encroaching soldier ants. Some exploded in toxic fumes, some melted soldier ants as if they were butter exposed to high temperature, while some disoriented them.
The rank 2 soldier ant was intelligent. It knew that if it was killed, the remaining rank 1 soldier ants wouldn’t be able to detect the woman and so, it decided not engage directly to eliminate the intruder. Until reinforcements arrive with the ability to detect the intruder, it will stand behind its kin.
“It was too smart for its own good…” The woman sighed, knowing that the rank 2 soldier ant would never engage her. While killing soldier ants that blocked her way with her mechanical tentacles and toxic potions, she soon reached the edge of the hall. Behind her is the wall, she’s surrounded and unable to get out unless she could travel through the dirt wall which was reinforced into a passageway by formic compound.
“It can’t be helped, I’ll have to hold out until Katsuki arrives… [Establishing Battlefield Control]!” Faint ripple of spiritual force undulation is being produced by her body as she takes out a horse-sized mechanical contraption. It has the form of a spider, but there are gun turrets on top of its body.
She quickly took five more and the mechanical spiders entrenched themselves around her, creating a perimeter. Since the ants do not understand the concept of fear, they are immediately attracted to the mechanical spiders but these machines have entrenched themselves in the ground so that they wouldn’t be affected by the recoils of their own guns.
Boom! Bang! Rattata!
Heavy machine gun, grenade launcher and high-caliber rifle, each of the mechanical spiders’ gun turrets have all three. The moment they started firing, they pushed back the approaching ants soldiers. The heavy machine guns were able to suppress them while the grenade launcher explosive rounds completely created a space for the metal bullets of the high-caliber rifle turret to pierce the carapace of the soldier ants and kill them through precise snipes.
While the woman closed her eyes, her telepathic thoughts were rapidly being expended.
The spider-turrets looked like they had an auto-target function to kill the nearest soldier ants, but it wasn’t actually the case. They are being used through manually targeting the ants with a telepathic link. Despite looking fragile, she has the eight tentacle arms to protect her, and so, the priority target of the spider-turrets aren’t the nearest but the most dangerous one. It’s fine if one or two soldier ants are able to pierce through her defensive parameter as her mechanical arms can kill them with some effort.
As the corpses of the soldier ants piled up, the ammunition of the gun turret reached its limit but the woman wouldn’t be an expert if she didn't have the method to deal with this. She took out a group of flying bee-shaped drones with the size of a human head, some carrying a large ammunition box. During the onslaught of the spider-turret, the bee-drones did maintenance and reloading so that the turret didn't have to stop its assault.
Still, the pressure of the soldier ants is enormous. Swarm-type creatures might be weaker than others, but they are relatively cheaper and faster to groom. To keep up with the increasing pressure of the endless tide of soldier ants, the woman took our more spider-turrets and bee-drones from her dimensional storage.
In less than two minutes, there were already a dozen spider-turrets and a few dozen bee-drones doing maintenance upon the turrets. The smell of fire-path gunpowder is extremely strong as empty bullet shells are being taken by the bee-drones so that they can be recycled. Her defenses were sturdy because she also occasionally threw toxic potions that dissolved the corpse of the soldier ants, not allowing them to use their dead kin as a shield.
However, her defense is not perfect.
One of her spider-turrets has been sprayed by a short-range formic acid. Its crucial parts become hot and melt under the acidic compound. An explosion that pushed back some of the ants followed suit, but she wasn’t happy.
Each of her spider-turret is a precious asset. If not because of her mistake, she wouldn’t be using 12 of them at the same time.
“Should I use them as my last resort…?” She is extremely aware of her own situation. In less than a minute, the soldier ants would overwhelm her defense and even if she could break through the encirclement, she is sure that the Formic Hive Queen has sent a Slayer Ant to hunt her.
“There’s no need to hesitate. Spider-turrets might be precious, but they're not as precious as my own life…” She immediately decided to open up a path. Of the remaining 11 spider-turrets, three of them pulled themselves up from being entrenched and are sent for a suicidal charge.
These spider-turrets are immediately shredded by formic acid and pincers, but they also detonate all of the explosives in their storage. The shockwave caused by the explosion pushed back a significant portion of the soldier ants which also caused a lot of smoke.
In this dark underground lair, the ants are able to see through darkness but not smoke mixed with chemicals specifically designed to block the perception of ants. She uses the chance to store half of the remaining spider-turrets while the rest would continue firing to draw attention.
The mechanical tentacles on her back can extend and retract freely. Although the extension ability is not unlimited, the spine segment-like design allows her to have omnidirectional and unobstructed movement. She quickly left the periphery like a spider that moved through walls.
However, just as she was roughly 100 meter away, she felt her skin tingle and all the hairs on her neck raised. It was the reaction of danger. She immediately jumped back to evade.
Slash! If she did not jump back, she would be severed cleanly by an invisible blade.
“Damn, the Slayer Ant is here…” She squinted her hexagonal eye.
In the naked eye, the Slayer Ant is invisible as it has a cloaking carapace. But since she’s an elite who dares to come here, it was inevitable that she had prepared a countermeasure against Slayer Ant’s invisibility. The sensitivity of her eye is slowly being increased.
Normally, being able to see 3 basic colors is sufficient because the input of redundant information would make her senses overloaded. But since the Slayer Ant is invisible to the normal spectrum of color, she ‘releases’ the suppression of the input of her eye.
Four colors, five, seven… The Slayer Ant’s figure in the woman’s eye is exposed after she increases the detection to 12 colors. At this point, the information her eyes provided is redundant, but it is better to deal with redundant information than not being able to see the Slayer Ant.
“Is it a new variant?” She asked herself as she scrutinized the ant in front of her.
The Slayer Ant is a humanoid ant with four scythe-like limbs as hands. As a type specialized for assassination, its limbs are extremely sharp and its body possessed extreme flexibility designed for burst of speed.
Slash! In the fraction of a second that she used to analyse the Slayer Ant, it used the chance to attack her.
Just centimeters away from her neck, the Slayer Ant’s scythe-like limbs are deflected by an orange magical force-field. The woman does not want to fight against this assassin. As an Ant-species, they have numerical advantage against most other lifeforms. She wouldn’t believe if anyone told her that this swarm only has a single Slayer Ant.
Her expectation wasn’t betrayed. Just as her magical force field flared to life to block another attack too fast for her to react, another one appeared to attack her in her blind spot.
“Damn it!” She’s at her wits end.
The pace of the battle is too fast for her to react properly as she isn’t a frontline combatant. The explosive speed of the Slayer Ants is simply too much. With this pace, her magical force field would be shredded in less than thirty seconds.
“Fuck this!” She grit her teeth as she took out a vial of potion from her dimensional storage. This simple action forced her to endure five attacks from the two Slayer Ants. In the distance, she could sense another pair approaching her. Her situation is truly dire.
“Katsuki… You have to hurry and save me…” She slammed the potion to the ground as it exploded.1You should dedicate three minute of your life to watch and listen this The colorless and scentless potion quickly evaporated as she quickly used her mechanical arms to wrap herself into a ball.
Exactly the moment where she had cocoon herself in her mechanical limbs, the Slayer Ants’ scythes slashed at her. The woman’s magical force field flared up one last time, it cannot be used to defend against attack any longer, exposing her to the elements.
The Slayer Ants used its scythe once more to attack, but it suddenly freezes in its tracks. It cannot move its own body as its body was subjected to paralysis. Since the first Slayer Ant has been paralzyed, then the rest are quickly affected. The closest ants around the woman are affected by the poison, they are dropping like flies. Yet, even the woman herself isn’t confident with using this method as a trump card because there are simply too many ants in this location.
However, it seems like lady luck is on her side.
Next to her cocoon-like defensive position, the formic compound-reinforced rocks are undulating; they quickly turn into the finest sand particles. After a hole is formed large enough for a medium-class lifeform to pass through, a grayish silver wolf-shark hybrid emerges from it.
The wolf was larger than a horse, it dragged a chunk of ice on its shark tail like a beast of burden.
The wolf saw the cocoon-like metal ball surrounded by a few humanoid ants lying in paralysis, and then glanced at the periphery with its left eye shone in gold colors. Needless to say, it was the activation of Mordred’s [Psychometry] to investigate the events that happened in the past.
“It’s not safe yet for you to come out. This dumb girl saturates the area in a lethal amount of paralytic neurotoxin as a last resort, but she’s not immune to the effect. Well, she quickly consumed the antidote so she won’t die, but she’ll be paralyzed for a couple of hours. At the very least, we have about twenty minutes or so until Katsuki arrives in this location. I’ll take care of this for now, you can rest until the neurotoxin is diffused sufficiently.”
The ice block that Lupusrazor carried was actually containing Larissa Agatha. She does not have the ability to freely move in the ground like Lupusrazor, so this was the primitive but practical solution they chose to move quickly. < Okay, I’ll leave to your arrangement > She replied telepathically despite her body being frozen solid.
Lupusrazor then put his attention at the hundreds upon hundreds of Soldier Ants who are engaged with a group of spider-turrets.
“Rank 1 necro-path killer move, [Corpse Soul Explosi- whoops...” Lupusrazor paused. “Deactivating [Autopilot Configuration].”
Lupusrazor then raises its ears up, trying to scout the area better. Since this is an underground location, its pilot, Mordred, has greater investigation range. The echo of a single howl allows him to mapped several kilometers wide area in great detail.
“I can’t use my methods freely. The A.I is still stuck on local optimum instead of global optimum logic. I still need to add various parameters.” Mordred focused on the humanoid ants surrounding the egg-like mechanical limbs. “Slayer Ants? Heh… this reminds me a lot of big brother. He really likes playing with ants….”
Lupusrazor then heads over the chunk of ice that froze Larissa Agatha. He then shaves a bit of her Chronophagous Hoarfrost and uses it in his method, “Rank 1 necro-path killer move, [Death by Hypothermia]!”
The Slayer Ants, which was an elite rank 1 unit of this ant swarm, couldn't defend against Mordred’s killer move. And since they are currently being paralyzed by the orange-haired girl’s neurotoxin, they were literal meat on the chopping block. At this instant, cold white frost enveloped their body as they slowly approached death through hypothermia.
After killing the Slayer Ant effortlessly, Lupusrazor faced the ant soldiers who were surrounding this location. Due to the scentless and colorless neurotoxin, this area is actually a safe sanctuary from the soldier ants. Fifteen to twenty meter in diameter, any ants who approached within that range would be subjected to fatal paralysis. These ants are too powerful for the paralytic neurotoxin to kill them, but they couldn’t resist the strong paralysis.
“Let’s see…” Mordred pondered for a few moments before Lupusrazor made a new move. “Rank 1 necro-path killer move, [Death by Capital Punishment: Firing Squad]!”
Mordred could make any random killer move name and it will be real.
Lupusrazor’s shoulder opened up to reveal holes where distal phalange-sized mini-missiles launched themselves towards the nearest soldier ants. Boom! Boom! Boom! 48 explosions of missiles containing concentrated amounts of liquid nitrogen freeze the nearest group of ants.
It needs to be said that liquid nitrogen is easy to procure. Mordred merely harvested and divided the air in the world to get a large amount of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and other constituents. Even if the nitrogen is processed into liquid as snow and ice-path resource, it is considered a cheap rank 1 material. In other words, it is not as cold as Larissa Agatha’s time-freezing ice.
However, Mordred mixed the liquid nitrogen with ectoplasmic poison that would erode the soul. This was a compound attack that was more on the soul side rather than the physical. Although the ants have a bit of ice on their bodies, their cause of death is actually their truesoul being decimated.
“Haah…” Lupusrazor breathed in to savor the soul nutrient caused by their deaths.
< Mordred, can you give me a thousand souls? I am hungry? > Suddenly, Larissa Agatha sends a telepathic message. She saw him collecting soul-path resources and wanted to have some.
“Hahah.” Mordred chuckled. “You’re aiming for 100 souls but you’re so sure of my character of not sharing so you pumped up the numbers… right? Hmmm. Give me your strongest ice, I’ll give you a share…”
The moment Mordred finished his words, a pure crystalline white ice manifested in front of Lupusrazor. The ice is the size of a human head and it is undulated with thick water elemental particles.
“Okay, this’ll do.” Mordred smiled. Using someone else’s power to generate snow and ice-path resources is truly a wallet-friendly strategy.
Lupusrazor bite the ice which was so dense that it could be used as an armor. His shark-like teeth vibrated in a unique frequency so that the ice quickly shattered into fine crystalline grains of ice. He inhaled them all and quickly refined them for his own use, mixing it with some Frostheim Aqua and a few other materials.
“Rank 2 compound killer move, [Infallible Winter’s Curse]!”
As Lupusrazor’s howl suppressed all other sounds, he produced a wave of coldness omnidirectionally.2 On a completely unrelated note, here's a cool hunt The temperature of the underground chamber dived down rapidly into the negative hundreds. The move contains snow and ice-path, sound-path and soul-path profundity as the coldness freezes not only their physical bodies, but also their souls.
After his killer move, the underground chamber turned into an white icy domain where mere breathing the air would freeze one’s lungs. Needless to say, the rank 2 soldier ant is killed as it couldn’t resist the attack on both the physical body and soul.
< Impressive. Your snow and ice-path attainment wasn’t low at all, but you’ve forgotten about this child. > Larissa Agatha sent a telepathic message to reprimand Mordred.
“I trusted you to protect her, so it’s within my calculations.” Mordred glanced at the icy cocoon containing the girl that paralyzed herself. She is surrounded by Larissa Agatha’s ice but it was warmer than the ice that Mordred produces because it was a defensive killer move to protect the child from him. “You can get out now. The neurotoxin has been frozen.”
Clank! The ice that froze Larissa Agatha’s body instantly broke but her body still has a thin sheet of flexible ice armor to defend against Mordred's ice. “Say, aren’t you too good with using ice? Your technique seems to be higher than someone who have exemplary attainment-level in snow and ice-path…” she said while collecting the souls that has yet to broke down into soul nutrient.
Lupusrazor smiled with a hint of pride. “The one who taught me snow and ice-path was the strongest Sovereign in Morgen World…. well, if the Braves aren’t counted. He is the supreme leader of the Union in the Seas of Eternal Winters, Vladimirovich Stukov. Anyhow, let’s see who’s our damsel in distress.”
Mordred activated an information-path method through Lupusrazor and raised an amused expression. “I see. She’s a Mech-Accord Potioneer… Oh, she’s also a Yamato clansman.” He paused before continuing. “Larissa, your party is special among special cases. This extraplanar expedition seems to be more than meets the eyes.”
“What do you mean?” she inquired.
“This girl… is a member of the Hartina Kingdom’s royal family.”
