Two days later…
The rubble of crushed wooden walls and shattered glass fragments were crushed under Nox’s boots as he stepped through the devastated village. It was a complete scene of carnage, yet common for those who had to deal with attacks from the creatures that lived in the Keru Forest. The bright daylight made the devastation visible to the naked eye, and the entire place levelled.
Yet the village had survived for seven years up to this point. And on the very night, the soldiers came to arrest the villagers – the mineral ants struck at the exact same time. Nox bent down to pick up a chipped-off mineral ant’s scale, evidence of the villagers’ desperate last stand against the attacks.
There were no survivors in the entire village, with no house left unturned. The long history of the village has been turned to dust in a single night, now simply regarded as an evidence zone for Nox and his men, who scoured the area and picked apart the torn corpses to find any hints of external intervention.
The corpses were already rotting, swarming and crawling with maggots and files as bacteria and mould began to take over the exposed decaying flesh strung from their bones. Thankfully, Nox did not have to endure the smell due to his gas mask that was clasped tightly around the lower half of his face.
The dead soldiers had also been discovered, though their bodies and uniform lay in pieces strewn across the town, with a few sections missing. Nox noticed that only half of their equipment was left behind in the aftermath, but all of them were hardly working anymore, dented or bent over the course of the fight.
Nox’s suspicions grew even more when he had his men collect all the body parts, laying them out and matching them together. Soon, the central clearing was a collection of body parts arranged accordingly to whom they belonged.
He did a headcount of every corpse, including the soldiers as well. The gruesome sight hardly fazed him – it was nothing compared to the countless wars he had fought over the continent as a hired mercenary. This was a minor issue in that regard.
“What was the total number mentioned in the informant’s report?”
“53 members, including the two strangers, reported to have appeared out of nowhere from the forest.”
“Yet there are only 39 here. We are missing quite a few members.”
“Sir, it’s possible that other animals may have eaten the corpses here.”
“And coincidentally, all of the working military equipment were also kidnapped. It’s almost as if the mineral ants had some form of sentience.”
“Boss, we found something!”
Nox walked over to the hitmen who called it out, entering the abandoned smithy, which was completely overturned and wrecked. In the middle of the debris, the hitmen pointed at a barrel that was completely melted, trapped under a pile of rocks that they had been digging through.
His eyes widened as he quickly ordered the men to dig it out before taking it to examine it himself in the daylight. “Were the men issued with replaceable machine gun barrels?”
“No, sir – none of the soldiers sent was rated to use one. They would not be able to handle the arcia consumption.”
“So, missing corpses, missing weapons, and now someone with enough arcia energy to fire a machine gun long enough to melt it…” Nox could already see the signs too clearly. The missing corpses could be attributed to scavenger animals coming in to eat the remains, but from the machine gun barrel, it was obvious that there was someone of significant capability in the village.
“Call in more men – it’s time to hunt.”
***
The mineral ants trudged along the ground, moving between the trees as the members of Kyle’s new group rode on top of them. The young teenager clasped tightly onto Drake, still unused to the sensation of riding on such a large monster.
Hayden was currently leading the group with Kyle, heading towards a previous location that the revolutionaries had used before.
“There’s a cave system about a hundred and fifty kilometres from here that we used to hide in. There should be ample food and water stored there, and maybe we’ll be able to contact the old guard using the old channels.”
“What?! Going underground again?” Feldon groaned, his entire year so far having been mostly spent underground. First, it was the goblin den, then the catacombs, the dungeon and now some dingy old cave system. “It better have a sauna along with a nice plush bed.”
“You wish. Be prepared to sleep on the ground if necessary.”
“How far does the cave system extend?” Kyle interjected.
“Not too far. It’s a completely enclosed system. After the first time, we flushed it out of monsters, and we never encountered another one. All the tunnels lead to a dead end.” Hayden replied.
“And how long has it been abandoned?”
“Uhm… not long ago. Just after the war concluded.”
“That’s fifteen years ago.”
“Yea, not long ago.”
“Sounds like enough time for an entire horde of monsters to enter and make it their new home.”
“Right, I didn’t think of that.”
Kyle internally groaned but showed an apathetic face as they continued towards their destination. They stopped to rest intermittently, taking a few breaks.
Kyle used the time to help the members familiarise themselves with the new equipment. Each of them had a weapon, though there were only five repeaters and five pistols in total, not including Feldon’s handgun and Hayden’s machine gun.
All of them were stolen from the soldiers’ bodies, and the members knew exactly what had happened to the village, knowing that everyone they had known for the last seven years had died. However, none of them protested against Kyle, knowing that he could wipe them out in an instant if he so wished. They were even surprised when Kyle began to train them in the use of the weapons, initially expecting to become enslaved and defenceless.
Of course, Kyle was unafraid of them, even if all of them had machine guns. He no longer considered such grunts as his potential enemies anymore. After the fight with Soren and Rayner, he was now aware of a higher organisation that could most likely be hunting him down.
“Break’s over – we have to keep moving.” Kyle controlled the pacing, completely sure that they would be eventually tracked. He did not have enough time to clean up the place completely, and if any of the ten members had left traces of a trail in the forest without his knowledge, it could easily be picked up.
If I had a choice, I would glass the entire area into slag.
But Kyle did not have such firepower yet, so he had to make do with every possibility. He had a mineral ant move off with a bloodied cloth, using it to try and create diversionary trails through the forest to mislead anyone who was tracking from the forest, along with bits and pieces of a soldier’s uniform.
That should buy us some time – maybe a week or so before they catch up to us.
As they took yet another break half a day later, Kyle had to stop to let the mineral ants eat some of the loose rocks. The hungrier ones began to dig pits under the tree roots, burrowing deep into the ground to find any pockets of ore that their senses could detect.
The mineral ants seemed to be able to eat any type of ore, though they vastly preferred arcite ore or arcia crystals such as the one Kyle stole from the crystal outcrop in the dungeon.
MG404: [Item | Advanced-Quality Arcia Crystal | Not only pure but highly compressed due to geological processes unknown to man. | Unknown Usage.]
Kyle knew that this arcia crystal might be the key to his exosuit project, which he had not forgotten about. Combining this with the slovesa cores that he had collected from the first trial, he had enough prerequisite parts to create an arctech exosuit – but this would be something that he would need help with. Maybe Feldon…
He glanced at Feldon, who was snoring loudly while napping against the base of a tree, a train of small beetles already snaking across his neck into his open mouth and feeding on the bacteria inside. A beetle accidentally fell into his throat, causing Feldon to wake up with a bulging choke, coughing violently as he swung his hands frantically, swatting away the beetles.
Nevermind.
He would leave the organisation of the members to Feldon, but the exosuit project was a highly personal one. Preferably, he should do everything on his own, but he would need the right setup and metal parts as well. He had yet to do proper measurements for his own body – a suit’s measurements and an exosuit’s were vastly different, needing to account for actuation and running as well.
“Hayden, any facilities in the cave system?”
“Well, if the monsters that supposedly moved in didn’t wreck anything, then yes, there should be a few workshops inside that can be used to craft weapons and armour. That was what I was using in the past, though it would take some effort for it to get going again.”
“That’s fine.”
A day passed before they finally came to the supposed location, but there was hardly a mountain or hill in sight. Instead, it was just a dense forest all the way through.
“I don’t see any caves here!” Feldon exclaimed as he tried to peer through the foliage and greenery that surrounded them. “Are you sure you know the place?”
“It’s here, for sure.” Hayden leapt off the mineral ant that she was riding, walking up to an inconspicuous patch of fungi at the base of a tree and hacking away at it with a knife to reveal a small human-sized hole.
“That’s not a cave; that’s a tiny ass tunnel!”
“Do you want grand golden double doors, or do you want to hide? Hmm?”
The hole could not fit the mineral ants, so the members entered the tunnel first, with Hayden first entering inside and checking. They had to crouch low and shuffle their feet, some feeling a bit claustrophobic as their shoulders were already touching the walls.
Kyle didn’t mind, having climbed through service tunnels on a destroyer before. He glanced to the side, noticing certain points of the tunnel had small holes that allowed for one to observe the forest without being seen. Guerrilla tunnels - perfect.
The tunnel eventually led into a medium-sized room that was extremely dusty, with the walls being made out of hardened mud. The tables and furniture had not seen use in forever, coated in a thick layer of dirt. “This isn’t the only room in the system – there’s some further down. We’ll have to check them slowly, one by one. Maybe some poisonous insects might have moved in.”
“Are all the rooms this size?” Kyle asked.
“Only the workshops are bigger, but generally, yes, they are all around this size.”
“Too small.”
“I agree, but what are we going to do about it?”
Kyle followed Hayden’s lead first, checking out the next three ‘rooms’. Each of them could only fit two people or so, preventing any single attack by an aggressor from killing all members immediately. Works well for the defence layer, but underneath that, we will need an industrial layer to support the operations that I am planning for.
“We need to dig deeper into the ground. We’ll leave the tunnel system as the main entrance and exit, but we have to expand larger.”
“What, you’re expecting us to shovel? That’s going to take months to do anything of that scale.”
“Should only take a day. Everyone, get out of the tunnel system.”
“Huh?”
They reluctantly complied with Kyle’s orders, wondering what he was planning to do. As Hayden was the last one to exit the tunnel system, the mineral ants were commanded by Kyle to begin the expansion.
Instead of going through the old tunnel system, Kyle mapped the location of the rooms and dug a large shaft straight down, with the mineral ants using their blades and mandibles to carve away at the loose soil and underlying bedrock quickly.
“Now, where is that workshop you were talking about?”
Two days later…
The rubble of crushed wooden walls and shattered glass fragments were crushed under Nox’s boots as he stepped through the devastated village. It was a complete scene of carnage, yet common for those who had to deal with attacks from the creatures that lived in the Keru Forest. The bright daylight made the devastation visible to the naked eye, and the entire place levelled.
Yet the village had survived for seven years up to this point. And on the very night, the soldiers came to arrest the villagers – the mineral ants struck at the exact same time. Nox bent down to pick up a chipped-off mineral ant’s scale, evidence of the villagers’ desperate last stand against the attacks.
There were no survivors in the entire village, with no house left unturned. The long history of the village has been turned to dust in a single night, now simply regarded as an evidence zone for Nox and his men, who scoured the area and picked apart the torn corpses to find any hints of external intervention.
The corpses were already rotting, swarming and crawling with maggots and files as bacteria and mould began to take over the exposed decaying flesh strung from their bones. Thankfully, Nox did not have to endure the smell due to his gas mask that was clasped tightly around the lower half of his face.
The dead soldiers had also been discovered, though their bodies and uniform lay in pieces strewn across the town, with a few sections missing. Nox noticed that only half of their equipment was left behind in the aftermath, but all of them were hardly working anymore, dented or bent over the course of the fight.
Nox’s suspicions grew even more when he had his men collect all the body parts, laying them out and matching them together. Soon, the central clearing was a collection of body parts arranged accordingly to whom they belonged.
He did a headcount of every corpse, including the soldiers as well. The gruesome sight hardly fazed him – it was nothing compared to the countless wars he had fought over the continent as a hired mercenary. This was a minor issue in that regard.
“What was the total number mentioned in the informant’s report?”
“53 members, including the two strangers, reported to have appeared out of nowhere from the forest.”
“Yet there are only 39 here. We are missing quite a few members.”
“Sir, it’s possible that other animals may have eaten the corpses here.”
“And coincidentally, all of the working military equipment were also kidnapped. It’s almost as if the mineral ants had some form of sentience.”
“Boss, we found something!”
Nox walked over to the hitmen who called it out, entering the abandoned smithy, which was completely overturned and wrecked. In the middle of the debris, the hitmen pointed at a barrel that was completely melted, trapped under a pile of rocks that they had been digging through.
His eyes widened as he quickly ordered the men to dig it out before taking it to examine it himself in the daylight. “Were the men issued with replaceable machine gun barrels?”
“No, sir – none of the soldiers sent was rated to use one. They would not be able to handle the arcia consumption.”
“So, missing corpses, missing weapons, and now someone with enough arcia energy to fire a machine gun long enough to melt it…” Nox could already see the signs too clearly. The missing corpses could be attributed to scavenger animals coming in to eat the remains, but from the machine gun barrel, it was obvious that there was someone of significant capability in the village.
“Call in more men – it’s time to hunt.”
***
The mineral ants trudged along the ground, moving between the trees as the members of Kyle’s new group rode on top of them. The young teenager clasped tightly onto Drake, still unused to the sensation of riding on such a large monster.
Hayden was currently leading the group with Kyle, heading towards a previous location that the revolutionaries had used before.
“There’s a cave system about a hundred and fifty kilometres from here that we used to hide in. There should be ample food and water stored there, and maybe we’ll be able to contact the old guard using the old channels.”
“What?! Going underground again?” Feldon groaned, his entire year so far having been mostly spent underground. First, it was the goblin den, then the catacombs, the dungeon and now some dingy old cave system. “It better have a sauna along with a nice plush bed.”
“You wish. Be prepared to sleep on the ground if necessary.”
“How far does the cave system extend?” Kyle interjected.
“Not too far. It’s a completely enclosed system. After the first time, we flushed it out of monsters, and we never encountered another one. All the tunnels lead to a dead end.” Hayden replied.
“And how long has it been abandoned?”
“Uhm… not long ago. Just after the war concluded.”
“That’s fifteen years ago.”
“Yea, not long ago.”
“Sounds like enough time for an entire horde of monsters to enter and make it their new home.”
“Right, I didn’t think of that.”
Kyle internally groaned but showed an apathetic face as they continued towards their destination. They stopped to rest intermittently, taking a few breaks.
Kyle used the time to help the members familiarise themselves with the new equipment. Each of them had a weapon, though there were only five repeaters and five pistols in total, not including Feldon’s handgun and Hayden’s machine gun.
All of them were stolen from the soldiers’ bodies, and the members knew exactly what had happened to the village, knowing that everyone they had known for the last seven years had died. However, none of them protested against Kyle, knowing that he could wipe them out in an instant if he so wished. They were even surprised when Kyle began to train them in the use of the weapons, initially expecting to become enslaved and defenceless.
Of course, Kyle was unafraid of them, even if all of them had machine guns. He no longer considered such grunts as his potential enemies anymore. After the fight with Soren and Rayner, he was now aware of a higher organisation that could most likely be hunting him down.
“Break’s over – we have to keep moving.” Kyle controlled the pacing, completely sure that they would be eventually tracked. He did not have enough time to clean up the place completely, and if any of the ten members had left traces of a trail in the forest without his knowledge, it could easily be picked up.
If I had a choice, I would glass the entire area into slag.
But Kyle did not have such firepower yet, so he had to make do with every possibility. He had a mineral ant move off with a bloodied cloth, using it to try and create diversionary trails through the forest to mislead anyone who was tracking from the forest, along with bits and pieces of a soldier’s uniform.
That should buy us some time – maybe a week or so before they catch up to us.
As they took yet another break half a day later, Kyle had to stop to let the mineral ants eat some of the loose rocks. The hungrier ones began to dig pits under the tree roots, burrowing deep into the ground to find any pockets of ore that their senses could detect.
The mineral ants seemed to be able to eat any type of ore, though they vastly preferred arcite ore or arcia crystals such as the one Kyle stole from the crystal outcrop in the dungeon.
MG404: [Item | Advanced-Quality Arcia Crystal | Not only pure but highly compressed due to geological processes unknown to man. | Unknown Usage.]
Kyle knew that this arcia crystal might be the key to his exosuit project, which he had not forgotten about. Combining this with the slovesa cores that he had collected from the first trial, he had enough prerequisite parts to create an arctech exosuit – but this would be something that he would need help with. Maybe Feldon…
He glanced at Feldon, who was snoring loudly while napping against the base of a tree, a train of small beetles already snaking across his neck into his open mouth and feeding on the bacteria inside. A beetle accidentally fell into his throat, causing Feldon to wake up with a bulging choke, coughing violently as he swung his hands frantically, swatting away the beetles.
Nevermind.
He would leave the organisation of the members to Feldon, but the exosuit project was a highly personal one. Preferably, he should do everything on his own, but he would need the right setup and metal parts as well. He had yet to do proper measurements for his own body – a suit’s measurements and an exosuit’s were vastly different, needing to account for actuation and running as well.
“Hayden, any facilities in the cave system?”
“Well, if the monsters that supposedly moved in didn’t wreck anything, then yes, there should be a few workshops inside that can be used to craft weapons and armour. That was what I was using in the past, though it would take some effort for it to get going again.”
“That’s fine.”
A day passed before they finally came to the supposed location, but there was hardly a mountain or hill in sight. Instead, it was just a dense forest all the way through.
“I don’t see any caves here!” Feldon exclaimed as he tried to peer through the foliage and greenery that surrounded them. “Are you sure you know the place?”
“It’s here, for sure.” Hayden leapt off the mineral ant that she was riding, walking up to an inconspicuous patch of fungi at the base of a tree and hacking away at it with a knife to reveal a small human-sized hole.
“That’s not a cave; that’s a tiny ass tunnel!”
“Do you want grand golden double doors, or do you want to hide? Hmm?”
The hole could not fit the mineral ants, so the members entered the tunnel first, with Hayden first entering inside and checking. They had to crouch low and shuffle their feet, some feeling a bit claustrophobic as their shoulders were already touching the walls.
Kyle didn’t mind, having climbed through service tunnels on a destroyer before. He glanced to the side, noticing certain points of the tunnel had small holes that allowed for one to observe the forest without being seen. Guerrilla tunnels - perfect.
The tunnel eventually led into a medium-sized room that was extremely dusty, with the walls being made out of hardened mud. The tables and furniture had not seen use in forever, coated in a thick layer of dirt. “This isn’t the only room in the system – there’s some further down. We’ll have to check them slowly, one by one. Maybe some poisonous insects might have moved in.”
“Are all the rooms this size?” Kyle asked.
“Only the workshops are bigger, but generally, yes, they are all around this size.”
“Too small.”
“I agree, but what are we going to do about it?”
Kyle followed Hayden’s lead first, checking out the next three ‘rooms’. Each of them could only fit two people or so, preventing any single attack by an aggressor from killing all members immediately. Works well for the defence layer, but underneath that, we will need an industrial layer to support the operations that I am planning for.
“We need to dig deeper into the ground. We’ll leave the tunnel system as the main entrance and exit, but we have to expand larger.”
“What, you’re expecting us to shovel? That’s going to take months to do anything of that scale.”
“Should only take a day. Everyone, get out of the tunnel system.”
“Huh?”
They reluctantly complied with Kyle’s orders, wondering what he was planning to do. As Hayden was the last one to exit the tunnel system, the mineral ants were commanded by Kyle to begin the expansion.
Instead of going through the old tunnel system, Kyle mapped the location of the rooms and dug a large shaft straight down, with the mineral ants using their blades and mandibles to carve away at the loose soil and underlying bedrock quickly.
“Now, where is that workshop you were talking about?”
