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302. Where Are You?
🕑 Added 2025-02-12 15:00:03 +0000 UTC“Where are you?”
There was a pause.
“WE ARE EVERYWHERE.”
Ike licked his lips. “That’s nice and all, but where do I look when I talk to you?”
Another pause, this one broken only by the stifled sounds of Wisp giggling.
“LOOK DOWN.”
Ike looked down. He still saw nothing. Or rather, he saw what he expected to see. Rich earth, decaying leaves, the gnarled roots of trees climbing over one another. A few bugs wiggled around in the earth.
“I’m looking…?” he said, still lost.
A blast of killing intent emanated from the ground at his feet. For a split second, Ike thought the soil itself was mad at him, before he realized that there was something standing on the soil. Something very small, almost as dark as the soil itself. A tiny black ant, its antennae wiggling in irritation.
“Oh, the ant?” he asked.
“YOU SEE BUT ONE OF OUR MULTIFARIOUS FORMS.”
“They’re all the ants,” Wisp whispered.
Instantly, Ike tensed. A crawling sensation spread over his whole body, and he barely resisted the urge to wipe every limb clean. Ants? Thousands of tiny ants that he could barely see, powerful enough individually to be able to speak and manipulate mana? No thank you.
He focused on just the ant, pointing his aether directly at it. The ant was Rank 1, but then, how many ants were there in this forest? If ‘they’ were all Rank 1, they’d still be a formidable force to reckon with.
Ike glanced at Wisp and raised a brow. If ‘they’ were the ants that lived in this forest, then he understood why she’d been so giggly about it. This was indeed a hell of a reveal. Not to mention, more bugs? He had enough with the spider at his side. He didn’t need a thousand creepy crawlies creeping and crawling all over him.
“WHY HAVE YOU COME?” the ant demanded, in its outsized voice. The voice was female, but Ike suspected that assigning a gender to the ants-as-a-whole was a somewhat foolish task. Who knew how many there were of which genders? Better to take them in all at once as one they.
Ike nodded at the ant. “I heard that you have knowledge of a mental skill. I’ve come in search of it, if you’d be so kind as to share that knowledge.”
The ant considered for a moment, then dashed off. They were left alone in the forest once more—at least, as far as Ike could tell.
He glanced at Wisp. “How’d you meet them?”
“I was still a little baby spider, wandering through the world, seeing what I could see. We bonded, as fellow bugs.”
“Uh huh,” Ike said, suspicious. Sure thing, the glutinous spider had just ‘bonded’ with a ‘fellow bug.’ Sounded reasonable to him… not.
“What? Why are you looking at me that way? Spiders don’t eat ants. They’re all crispy and gross, with no juices to speak of, and some of them can do weird shit like spit acid. Plus, when they swarm, they can take down full-size animals. Rats and shit. I’m not going toe-to-toe with a whole nest for one mediocre crunchy snack.”
Ike considered for a moment. Come to think of it, he’d never seen ants in a spider’s web, but he had once seen ants carrying away the curled-up body of a dead spider. Between a nest of ants and a spider, did the spider really win? Maybe he’d been presumptuous to assume spiders were the apex predators of bugs. Ants weren’t impressive on their own, but even he grew uncomfortable about facing a thousand or so of them. Why wouldn’t a spider feel the same way? They would be larger, proportionally, to a spider, and just as vicious.
“Huh. I guess… it’s actually kind of believable,” Ike allowed.
“What do you mean, ‘kind of believable?’ It is believable, because it happened!” Wisp protested.
Mag fluttered up into a nearby tree. Taking bird form, he shook his claws off, probing them with his beak to be sure they were clear of ants. “Yuck, ants.”
“Ants are pretty scary,” Ike agreed.
“You just don’t like bugs,” Wisp accused him.
“Yeah? Bugs are nasty,” Ike said.
Wisp narrowed her eyes at him, then broke out into a big grin. “Hell yeah, brother. I’m nasty as fuck.”
Ike shook his head at her, not sure he liked the enthusiasm. Then again, she was a bug, so he didn’t really want her to be insulted, either. She might get ideas and bite him, or something.
“THIS WAY.”
Ike looked around, extending his mana as he searched for the ant. At last, he found it, wiggling its antennae at him from a rock along the riverside. Feeling his attention on it, the ant turned around and crawled off. Ike followed it, with only a little trepidation in his heart. Wisp bopped along beside him, not a worry in her mind.
The ant led them deeper and deeper into the forest. The twilight at the bottom of the trees grew darker and darker, and the soil became lusher and more moist, perpetually damp and laden with mushrooms. Roots knitted so tight across the forest floor that at times, Ike had no option but to scramble over slippery wood. Everything was wet. The trees, the soil, and before long, Ike and Wisp as well. Ike wiped his face and took what felt like a quarter-inch of water off his face. His clothes soaked through with sweat and dew, as his body struggled to shed heat and took on the forest’s water at the same time.
Every now and again, Ike lost track of the ant, its mana signature vanishing among the roots, only for it to reappear ahead of him yet again. Despite its small size, it stayed well ahead of Ike and Wisp, no matter how fast Ike picked up his walking pace. Ike was tempted to try sprinting and see how the ant handled that, but held himself back. He didn’t want to accidentally step on an ant and start a war, or irritate their host by overtaking them. Fighting one powerful person was a different prospect than fighting a million tiny things that could bite him anywhere and crawl all over his body without him noticing. Something about that just fundamentally terrified him. Maybe he was crazy, but it just… got under his skin. Or over his skin, as it were.
As they walked, they slowly drew closer to a powerful presence. Ike couldn’t place its Rank, or its power. It fluctuated constantly. One second, it was so powerful that it chilled his bones; the next, it was so weak that he could barely sense it at all. He frowned. What happened, to make them this volatile?
“WE ARRIVE,” the ant announced, and vanished behind a curtain of leaves. Ike took a deep breath, reflexively brushed off his arms, then followed it in.
