Theo watched as the Ant Queen experiments with different strategies.

One involved luring a slime toward the colony with the help of the worker ants. It worked, but at a cost, leading to some casualties. Once they were above the ground, the ants lost much of their strength, which led to them dying.

Theo saw the slime dissolve them within its body, only to realize something unexpected: the ants’ carapaces were so strong that they didn’t disintegrate fully.

That made Theo feel uneasy. If the slime recognized them as a rich source of nutrients, it might start actively hunting the ants as well. At least, that was what Theo suspected.

The next tactic was something that caught him completely off guard, never having thought that the Ant Queen would try.

The ants pinpointed the location the slime would surface above the ground and rapidly dug toward the exact spot; hundreds of ants worked with a single goal: reach the slime before it could react.

The first attempt failed. The slime shifted its body sideways at the last moment, and the ants ended up biting into the empty ground instead of the slime.

Even so, Theo was impressed. Watching the ants bring out hunting tactics for a beast that was not their size at all.

It was like watching normal humans with spears trying to fight, hunt, and then take care of a woolly mammoth.

But then came the last strategy that made Theo believe that it truly revealed the Ant Queen’s intelligence.

The way they were acting, Theo could tell that the Ant Queen was using the same tactic they had come across when the smile first attacked the ants.

And for it, another large ant had been deliberately sacrificed to lure the slime closer to the colony’s entrance.

And just like the first time, it worked.

The slime pushed its body inside, drawn by the promise of easy prey.

This time, however, the ants didn’t engage the slime early. They waited, letting it move deeper, until it reached the first chamber.

Then, in an instant, Theo saw hundreds of ants snap at the slime’s body at once, their coordinated bites forcing it to recoil.

At that moment, the slime stopped extending and collapsed into a dense, compact mass at the chamber’s center.

The ball was much larger than the first one, making the hunt successful.

They repeated the process again and again.

At some point, Theo began to doubt whether it was even the same slime each time. If it was, there was no way it could be this dumb.

But fast forward a lot of hunts, the Ant Queen showed the last strategy.

Far above the deep chambers of the colony, the ants dug a massive vertical pit, far from any of the chambers.

The change in approach was obvious to Theo; this wasn’t just an adaptation, it was a drastic change of intelligence.

And then, the ants lured a slime toward them.

This time surprisingly, there were no casualties.

Theo watched as the slime noticed the hole the ants had made and went in, as if feeling it was a jackpot.

It went fully inside the hole; its body elongating perfectly to fit the narrow descent.

It kept moving downward, following the ants that had retreated deeper into the tunnel.

And that was when thousands of ants swarmed the opening and started pushing the soil into the hole.

The soil began pouring onto the slime’s body, but instead of burying it, it just entered its body and was getting consumed by the beast.

And while all its focus was on the ants moving down the tunnel. Above, the spider moved from the ground and toward the opening of the hole too and started shoving more soil inside.

The output increased considerably, and before the slime could realize it, a steady stream of soil was continuously moving down the hole.

Theo watched as the ants worked in perfect sync, pushing the soil inward, and couldn’t help but feel proud of their productivity. The size increase had definitely helped them.

But he didn’t realize that what the ants were doing was a lot more than just pushing soil out.

He saw a large chunk of soil fall down onto the slime, each chunk absorbed by it.

Then came hundreds of ants, who began loosening massive chunks of soil and making them fall down into the hole.

That was when the Ant Queen explained to him that they were using the tunnel sense ability, they were identifying the aerated pockets in the soil and expanding them so that the soil wouldn’t have anything to anchor itself with and would collapse in itself.

Soon, it came to a point where the slime found itself at a dead end, its body already filled with excess soil.

There was more soil than it could eat, and instinctively it tried to move upward.

Alas, the ease at which it had moved down wasn’t going to be the same while moving up. It was slow—painfully slow. And with so much soil falling over it, the slime was forced to harden itself as a risky amount of soil entered its body.

It needed time to digest before it could let more enter its body.

Above, the ants worked like there was no tomorrow and kept pouring down soil relentlessly until nearly a quarter of the hole was already covered.

’So they buried it alive...’

The ants were ruthless, but it didn’t end there.

At the bottom, where the slime was trapped, countless more ants awaited for an order.

And the moment the order finally came, the ants surged forward, darting out from hidden tunnels, snapping off small chunks of the slime’s body with their mandibles, before retreating to the tunnels they came out from.

It came to a point that whenever the slime tried to follow the ant that tried to eat it, the poor one would get bitten from another tunnel from some other direction.

And that happened in the number of hundreds, at the same time, then another hundred.

And the worst part for the slime was that it couldn’t even let its body become normal.

The moment it did, the soil pressing over its body would flood into its body in quantities it couldn’t digest in time.

And even its hardened stare offered little protection, as it was being bitten little by little by the mandibles; their crushing force was too much to handle.

So in the end, the Ant Queen just revealed a chamber that was filled with a lot of those cores, making Theo realize this wasn’t the first time in the forest to have met such a fate.

But such was the law of the forest, at least for the ones dwelling in it.

It was the survival of the fittest.

The Ant Queen then showed him another chamber. Inside, globes of slime were being taken care of and preserved while being suspended everywhere in thick spider webs.

Theo stared, growing more astonished with every passing second.