I Became an Ant Lord, So I Built a Hive Full of Beauties-Chapter 495: Scarlet Echoes

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And once, in a cave that smelled like dust and decisions and bad self-control, he had opened it to a woman who had been very clear about wanting nothing from him but a night and the location of his mountain.

Her name touched the Road now like a fingertip.

Before he could quite turn his attention, the system noticed for him.

[Ding! Soul-Road ping detected.

Origin: IKEA.

Link strength: moderate.

Sender status: unranked / obscured. Respond? Y/N.]

Kai blinked.

For a second, another message tried to elbow its way in. It was very small and very rude and sounded like Shadeclaw: Of course she picks the night after you almost die to call. Your bed is never going to be just for sleeping, is it.

He ignored the imaginary Shadeclaw and focused on the notification.

IKEA.

He had not heard from her since that last time he contacted him. After that messy, wonderful, entirely inconvenient night. He had thought of her from time to time. In the egg chamber, once, when he had been deciding which parts of himself to make bigger and which to make sharper, and had caught himself wondering with faint, horrified amusement whether she would approve of the changes. During one particularly boring logistics meeting when someone had said "IKEA unit" about a set of storage crates and his brain had provided a completely unrelated mental image.

He had assumed she was busy chasing whatever mystery had stripped her of her rank. Or that she had simply decided, as she had warned him she might, to file him under "pleasant memory" and go on with her long, odd life.

Now her touch on the Road trembled a little, like a knock delivered by someone who was not entirely sure the door was still there.

[Ding! Respond? Y/N.]

Kai did not hesitate.

"Yes," he thought.

The system obligingly vanished.

The Soul Road thread brightened.

For a heartbeat he tasted desert dust and the faint spice of her aura, that strange not-quite-blankness that had bothered the system so much last time. Then her voice slid into his mind, as casual and too-close as if she had leaned over the bed and spoken into his ear.

"You take forever to respond," Ikea said. "If this is your idea of playing hard to get, you should know it does not work on women who have personally outsmarted sandstorms."

His mouth curled before he could stop it.

"Hi," he said, out loud and down the soul road, both.

Luna snored in answer. The Soul Road answered with a small, electric ripple.

"Hi?" she repeated. "That is it? You nearly get yourself killed, your mountain smells like a forge trying to eat an army, and you say hi?"

He froze.

"How do you know—?"

"Later," she said. "Answer first: did you nearly get yourself killed?"

"Define ’nearly,’" he said.

She made a noise that could have been a sigh or a growl.

"You are doing it again," she said. "Deflecting with words. You did not do that when I had you pinned to the camp wall, you know."

Heat tried to climb up his neck. He pressed the back of his head more firmly into the stone.

"Is this your version of bedside manner?" he muttered. Then, more soberly, he asked her, "Ike... Ikea. Did you solve your problems?"

The question had sat in him since she vanished. It felt strange to say it aloud now, with his side still aching and the smell of old blood in his nose, but it came anyway.

"Did you find what you were looking for?"

For a few seconds, the Road carried only her breathing. Then she exhaled, and some of the humor in her tone slipped aside.

"No," she said simply. "I did not. I found clues. I found places that used to know me and decided they liked me better with less power. I found out that to regain what I lost I have to change my heart, and that is very rude because I was rather fond of my old one. But no. I did not fix it."

She paused, then added, lighter but with something brittle under it, 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"I am the reason for my no rank right now. That is what the clever places say. Not some curse. Not some thief. Me. My choices. My... appetite. So. There. That is my tragic confession for the night. You may now forget about me and go back to being a very busy mountain lord."

"I am not going to forget about you," he said automatically.

"Flatterer," she said, but there was a little hitch in it. Her attention shifted. He felt it like a change in wind direction.

"What happened there?" she asked. "Do not tell me anything made up. I am not blind, and the desert does not bleed by itself. I came looking for you. You told me to visit your mountain. But what I am seeing now from the outside..."

He felt her move, through the Road and through some other, subtler sense. A footstep on gravel. The way her aura brushed against one of the outer scars on the slope.

"You fought a battle," she said. "Against who? Who attacked you? And why?"

Kai stared at the dark wall above him.

There were a dozen ways he could answer that. He could give her Vorak’s full list of commands. He could start with the first time the Scarlet Ant Kingdom current queen Hoorius had decided his hive looked like a useful acquisition. He could talk about the princesses sleeping under his roof with guards outside their doors and worry under their carefully schooled expressions.

What came out instead was simpler.

"I have some enemies," he said. "They want to harm my peaceful life. That is the important part. Their identity... less so. They are my enemy. That is what matters."

He let the Road carry a fraction of the exhaustion he felt.

"But you, Ikea, should leave. Do not come near the outer border of my mountain. It is very dangerous right now. They are still out there. You might be captured by my enemy or used as leverage. I will reach out to you when I am done with the war."