I Became an Ant Lord, So I Built a Hive Full of Beauties-Chapter 494: Help Coming! (Part two)

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She quickened her pace. The planned playful route through the side forest vanished. She angled instead toward one of the lesser watched approaches, a carved gully that led to a service entrance Luca had once told her about with all the enthusiasm of a man sharing gossip about plumbing. Her feet slid on loose gravel. Her pack thumped against her back. The desert wind tugged more insistently at her clothes now, as if trying to either slow her or hurry her and unable to decide which would be more entertaining.

Halfway down the gully she almost tripped over a discarded spear. Ant make. The haft was cracked. The head was missing. A little way beyond it lay a drone’s broken plate, the inner side showing where had cut it free rather than spend time unbuckling straps.

She crouched and ran her fingers over the edge of the plate.

Not long ago, she murmured. The stone under it is still cold, not baked. And people do not leave their people’s armor lying around unless they are very busy or very tired.

She hesitated. For a moment, the sensible part of her brain made a list. Arriving in the middle of a crisis. Unknown enemy strength. Her own rankless state. The fact that she had come here intending to tease and tangle, not to be useful.

Then she remembered the way Kai had looked up at her last time. Not during the sex, though that had certainly been a look. After the sex. When he had admitted in a tone that tried to be casual and failed that he had no one else who understood certain kinds of weight and power. ’Lust.’ That the hive felt huge and small at the same time and he was afraid of failing them and also afraid of what he would become if he never failed at all.

She stood.

"I did not come here to be sensible," she told the empty gully. "I came here to surprise him. Mission parameters have just changed. Now the surprise includes not letting him bleed to death before I jump him."

Her hand brushed her own flat, stubborn status panel.

"No star," she said. "No handy rank. No shiny badge. Fine. I have other things. I have experience. I have opinions. I have the ability to nag him into drinking water even when he thinks he is made entirely of stubbornness."

She reached out once more along the Soul Road, firmer now. "I have a status that can stop any war here. Because... I am Scarle..."

She paused, "Kai," she thought. "If you fall over before I get there, I am going to be very annoyed with you."

No words came back. But the thread pulsed, just once, like the flicker of an eyelid on a sleeping patient when you say their name.

"Good," she said under her breath. "Stay that way. Awake enough to suffer for my company."

She slung her pack more securely and moved on toward the mountain, toward the wounded hive, toward the ant lord who had no idea that an exhausted, rankless, and a title holder, somewhat irritated mystery woman was on her way to both complicate his life and, if necessary, destroy it because of her own Ideology.

(Back to Kai...)

Meanwhile, The mountain slept badly.

It did what it could. Stone wrapped itself around wounded bodies. Heat from the lower vents crept up through the floors in soft waves. Somewhere far below, Miryam’s cocoon hummed the same calm, steady note as always, a lullaby with no idea that anyone needed comfort.

Kai lay on his back in one of Luna’s better excuses for a bed and tried very hard not to breathe too deeply.

The old spearhead in his side was gone. Getting it out had involved three sets of hands, two arguments, and one moment where Luna had growled something creative about his ancestry and told him if he clenched his muscles one more time she would tranquilize him with a hammer. The wound was packed and bandaged. Adaptive Armor was sulking quietly somewhere in his nervous system. His left thigh throbbed where the commander’s knee had hit it. His ribs ached every time his heart remembered its job.

[Ding! System notification-

HP: 2610 → 3120/7000.

Status: stabilized.

Bleed: minimal.

Recovery trajectory: acceptable, assuming compliance.]

The system’s idea of "assuming compliance" and Luna’s idea of "assuming compliance" were, unfortunately for Kai, very similar.

He shifted a little. The stone shelf under him had been shaved flat and padded with woven mats, but it was still stone. His plates clicked softly as they settled.

On the other side of the alcove, Luna snored.

She would have denied it vigorously if asked. She called it "restful exhaling with character." Whatever it was, it came in short, indignant little bursts from the healer’s pallet she had finally allowed herself to collapse on, after extracting a promise from Shadeclaw and Yavri and three other people that they would drag Kai back here by his antennae if he so much as looked like he might stand up.

He had given his word. He was keeping it. He was only lying here, thinking unhelpful thoughts at the ceiling.

Seven hundred who can still stand. Three hundred dead. Vorak is still out there. Tomorrow he comes himself.

He closed his eyes. Not to sleep. Just to rest from the sight of stone.

The Net was quiet. He had muted most of the outer channels. Any drone on duty could still pulse an emergency, but the normal low-level buzz of chatter and status reports was gone. He had needed that during the battle. Now he needed silence just as badly.

He did not realize how much silence he had until something tapped on it.

It was not the Net’s usual metallic taste. It was not the Crown’s cold, bright pressure. It was another kind of line altogether, thinner, older, running under everything else like a buried nerve.

The Soul Road.

He had opened more of it than he liked over the past months. A trickle to Miryam. A thread to Akayoroi. A cautious, shielded strand to a certain princess who had needed to know he could hear her if her guards tried to get too clever.