Deadworld Isekai

The throne room was large. It was always clear to Matt that this was the throne room. If the guards weren’t a dead giveaway, the sheer size of the chamber would have done it. As he plotted out his looping course, he had triangulated enough to know that it was at least an order of a magnitude bigger than any of the other, more utilitarian, rooms he had encountered.

If that wasn’t enough, the light was different in the throne room. Matt had noticed this back when he was observing the entrance. He couldn't quite see past the ten or so hulking guards, but there was motion and shining objects. Now that he was in the room, he could identify what was going on in crisp detail. This room was lined with eggs, being tended to by dozens of nursing ants, they were tiny. Where guard ants had been almost twice as big as the standard-issue ants, these were about half the normal size.

They were, apparently, built for detail work And they were absolutely focused on that task, moving around delicate eggs without so much as leaving a mark on them. Matt couldn't quite make out what exactly they were doing, but he assumed that it was some variation of cleaning, tending, and making sure they were healthy. The eggs themselves were bioluminescent, glowing purple things filled with cloudy purple liquid. They looked a lot like if someone had somehow captured a nebula in a glass orb. In a giant room completely lined with these purple eggs, the effect was striking.

It also made Matt hopeful that he had chosen the right plan of attack. As much as he could hunt ants, he also had to contend with the queen's reproduction rate. He could see various eggs that were farther along in the hatching process, showing outlines of the ant beyond the purplish liquid inside them. With the many hundreds of eggs in the room, he was unlikely to ever get truly ahead of the queen’s breeding capability with the kind of violence he could output by himself.

Which brought him to the queen. And she was no slouch herself. Matt had expected her to be different from the other ants, and she was. He thought it was likely she would be bigger, and she didn’t disappoint. But he hadn’t thought she’d be beautiful, and somehow she was. Where the normal ants' exoskeletons were mostly roundish, sloped off things like earth ants tended to be, hers was all angles, each surface arcing towards a sharp, crisp break to a new side. Not square, exactly. Just defined, looking as planned and designed as a supercar.

Any hope Matt that had where she would turn out to be a non-combatant was dashed by another thing that augmented her beauty. She looked fast. Not fast in a “can dash in a straight line” way, but more in a way Matt would describe as nimble or agile. She didn’t just look like she could run, she looked like she could move. If the standard issue ants looked sturdily all-terrain in their design, the queen looked lethal.

That lethality was reinforced by her weaponry as well. The nursing ants were smaller than Matt, which meant stomping wouldn’t be much of an issue. Not so with the queen. The angles extended to her legs, which ended in sharp points rather than normal feet. They were also big enough that even a single one of her legs could credibly spear him without much issue. More striking was the fact that the queen had mandibles that looked like two scythe blades, big sharp things that looked like they were used to cutting things in half.

Things like human invaders to the throne room.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the worst of Matt's worries. That title belonged to her intelligence. Even the guard ants had seemed pretty mindless in the face of pheromones. They knew not to let just anybody into the throne room, but at the same time they couldn’t identify him as a threat.

The queen was different. She didn’t have antennae. She had eyes. She was the source of the pheromones, the authority who gave the orders and not the underlings that received it. Almost as soon as she saw Matt, she shifted from a reclining position into a full fighting posture.

“Matt, I think she knows we aren’t locals.”

“No shit. Holy hell, she’s terrifying.”

The queen opened and closed her mandibles with a horrifyingly sharp shink sort of sound, then started moving. It was on. Matt just hoped that she hadn't thought to call back all of her minions.

—

“That’s another skill down!”

“Shit!”

The queen had turned out to be every bit as fast as she looked. Matt had gone to meet her with the plan of sliding under her to get around to an unguarded side. He managed to get by her mandibles as he did, but before he was actually under her abdomen, she pivoted in place like a boxer, dipping her head and going after his centerline with her razor-sharp jaws.

Shit. This is going to be harder than I thought. Matt had narrowly avoided getting bisected by burning a huge amount of stamina, kicking off the ground, and using Spring-Fighter to move him back much faster than he could have managed on his own. After that, he ran.

After Matt recovered from his first abortive attack, he turned to face the queen head-on, trying to stay out of range until he could figure out a way past her mandibles to attack her flanks. This turned out to be hopeless. She had better range with her jaws than Matt had with his spear, and could turn faster than he could strafe her position. He almost immediately abandoned attacking and stayed out of range to observe her movements. She responded to this by attacking herself, and she was far faster in a lunge than Matt’s organic speed.

He was able to keep from being chomped by judicious activations of Spring-Fighter. The queen seemed hard-wired to try to grab prey by the center of her jaws. After a couple of repetitions of over-using his mobility skill, Matt was able to figure out the basic timing of her lunge and move just far enough back as her mandibles closed, which left him time to jab at her face with his spear. This proved to be ineffective, unfortunately. He couldn’t reach her eyes, and the spear didn’t seem to be capable of even scratching her exoskeleton.

Worse, his use of Spring-Fighter wasn’t sustainable. His STAM bar was draining away. Sooner or later, he’d run out of juice, and she’d get him. But when he dodged close to the wall, the lucky reality of the queen's more careful behavior around her eggs showed itself. She was afraid of hitting them, taking a split second more to position and attack than she had out in the open. It was a big enough difference that Matt had time to dodge to the side rather than retreat back, and save on his use of Spring-Fighter. It still wasn’t a forever solution, but the drain was much slower.

More importantly, that was the first weakness he had found in the queen. Her apparent care for her eggs.

In the meantime, Survivor’s Reflexes was hard at work. The other ants had all been similar enough to each other that they shared weak points, and Survivor’s Reflexes was able to treat them all as one single variety of foe. The queen was running on a different enough chassis that this wasn’t true for her. Not only did the fight start without even a small clue as to where to hit her, but even as the weak points started to show themselves, they were all in places that would be hard for Matt to hit. Minutes into the fight, her legs didn’t show any weaknesses at all. The weak points that Matt could see were to the rear of her body near the ovipositor, and dead-center on her belly. Otherwise, she appeared to be covered up by her hard, un-weak exoskeleton.

After several rounds of hugging the wall and dodging to the side, Matt made a desperate lunging strike at her eye and got lucky, putting a deep nick into it. He was ecstatic about landing the blow, up until she whipped her head around while his weight was still over-committed towards her and sent him flying. She probably couldn’t see out of that eye now, but that didn’t do him much good while he was heaped on the ground. He got back on his feet just in time to meet her next charge, dodge, and then aim at her other eye.

At the exact moment, Survivor’s Combat chose to take a break. Suddenly, Matt’s footwork sucked. His ability to stab stuff with a spear plummeted, and he fully missed his target. Without perfect footwork, his balance felt off and he tried his best to stabilize. That also meant he wasn't paying as much attention to his strike. With all the artificial muscle memory gone, the spear shocked against the queen’s exoskeleton and jerked out of his hands.

Luckily, his movement skills were still intact. And the previous lunge had taught Matt something important. The outside of the queen's chompers weren’t sharp like the insides were. They could club him, but not cut him. As the mandibles came around to smack him, Matt dumped just enough juice into Survivor’s Reflexes to almost match their speed, braced his hands against the jaw, and let the momentum fling him away from the danger zone.

The queen wheeled around in a rage, rushing after him. As Matt landed, she was already almost to his position, fully prepped for another strike. Matt’s STAM was running low at about a quarter of his total reservoir, but as her mandibles started to close, he dumped about half of it into moving back and then quickly forward. That brought him right up to her face, where he grabbed on to a joint in the armor near her cheek.

Matt had had good success in the past with brute force can’t-miss techniques. He didn't need to be a combat expert for those attacks. Without his spear, Matt went for his club, bringing it down again and again on the joint where the queen's mandible met her cheek. Meanwhile, the ant did it’s best to dislodge him, slamming its head up and down against the ground and swinging it side to side wildly. Matt’s armored pants were thankfully structurally sound enough to keep his legs from getting serious scrapes, and he was glad to feel Rub Some Dirt In It kicking it to heal up the remaining damage. With any luck, he’d at least be able to stand by the time he was ready to let go.

Just before the ant managed to break his grip, Matt’s club went from simply bouncing off the joint to actually sinking in a bit, producing loud cracking noises and visibly causing the ant queen’s panic to intensify. He managed to bring down the club a few more times in parting, causing some more satisfying crunches that he hoped indicated the mandible wouldn’t work quite as well moving forward, and then he was flying again.

Once he climbed back to his feet, Matt sprinted away for as long as he could, trying to maintain as much distance as possible, until he suddenly realized he couldn’t hear the queen chasing him. He looked back to see her waving her head around in apparent pain, which made sense considering the deep wound he had left in her first eye. As she continued thrashing, she suddenly lifted her tail end into the air, vibrating her abdomen in a bizarre, jerky way.

“Matt! You see that? Is that another attack?”

“Yeah. I do. It's good news as long as she's not calling the other ants.”

“Good news?”

As if in answer to her question, the queen suddenly stopped moving, and a hissing sound filled the room as a cloud of vapor erupted from somewhere on her back half.

“Oh. Oh, no.”