Iron Blooded Hound

Chapter 185: Ant's Gambit

In the darkness.

A child stood alone.

'Get out.'

The voice of a middle-aged man.

A memory from a distant past he didn't even recognize.

'This scum is not my blood.'

The voice was bitterly cold.

It is followed by the sobs of a mother.

'You lowly thing, you don't even know what you're talking about.'

'Get him out of here now.

'... ... get rid of him.

The sobs are followed by a chorus of chatter around the room.

The child's vision shifts several times after that.

A fleeing mother, forests and mountains, pursuers, steep cliffs, raging rivers, hungry wolves, and the startled faces of passing merchants and mercenaries.

Time passes, and so do memories.

His mother, who never smiled and always looked at him with a sad expression,.

The stepfather, who was always there to comfort and support him and to give his son the love he deserved,.

In the face of my father's dedicated efforts, my mother was gradually able to smile.

The house, which had always been narrow, dark, and musty, slowly became wider, brighter, and warmer.

The things that went into his mouth gradually changed from harsh things with a sour smell to sweet and soft things.

And so began a life worth envying.

A mother's pride is a father's hope.

For the sake of his mother's newfound happiness and to repay his father's dedication, the child chose a challenge of his own.

Enrollment in the Colosseo Academy.

It was the result of his own hard work, combined with his father's life's savings.

His mother was nervous that he would be enrolled in a school that attracted only the best and brightest in the Empire.

His father smiled from ear to ear as he spent his life's savings on a life of luxury.

He thought, 'I'm going to make my parents happy by being a good student here.'

He wanted to show his mother, who was full of misery, and his father, who had dedicated his life to making her happy.

But things didn't go so well.

At his first school, he was bullied. This was due to his timid nature.

When he went to a regular school outside, he was a leader, active, and achieved excellent results in various sports, but here in Colosseo, where only the most talented people in the empire gather, he was just an inferior student.

His brilliant mind and relatively weak body have failed him in tests.

Even now, he was in danger of losing his life.

And now, pushed to the limit, his mind is replaying the earliest sights and sounds he can remember.

'Get out. This scum is not my blood.'

Flashlight.

With his body and mind pushed to the limit, the child struggles, barely holding on to a sense of identity that is about to explode.

Just then.

'It's okay now.'

A voice came out of nowhere.

It had a greater effect than any other magic in the world, instantly dissipating the child's physical and emotional pain.

No more birth anxiety, no more guilt for his parents, no more sense of duty as a child, no more studying, no more loneliness for not being able to make friends, no more physical pain—just one word to relieve it all.

It was the consolation of a friend.

"...uh!?"

The child opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw were three faces.

"Hey, Piggy! Are you okay? Breathe, Piggy! Breathe! Come on, breathe; don't die!"

"Okay, he's breathing again; my northern warrior CPR is working...!"

"Hey, shut up and pump his chest now, and you get to massaging his limbs!"

Tudor, Sancho, and Bianca. I can see my friends looking down at me, their faces covered in tears and snot.

Tudor's emotions are always high, but I'm surprised to see even Sancho and Bianca crying.

Piggy woke up with a groan.

His ribs were cracked. Maybe even broken.

But even through the pain, Piggy moved on to find someone.

"Vikir! Vikir! Vikir!"

Tudor, Sancho, and Bianca's expressions changed strangely.

Suddenly, the eyes of the four friends focused on one place.

And there it was.

Pow! Puff! Puff-puff-puff-puff!

You see the back of Vikir, who is furiously shooting ants with his bow.

* * *

'Hmm. At this rate, I should be able to catch them even if I'm only using the strength of an expert level.'

Vikir thought as he pierced the skull of one of the soldier ants with a single shot.

He didn't even need to pull out his Graduator Aura.

Because....

'I've got a knack for killing ants anyway.'

Vikir knows all of the strategies for killing ants that are currently unknown.

Giggle-giggle-giggle-

A swarm of killer ants swarms around Vikir and targets him.

But Vikir stays calm and shoots an arrow into the ant's thoracic plate, the area between its head and chest.

Surprisingly, the destroyed ants begin to move backward instead of forward.

The ants that had been swarming forward began to walk backward, causing great confusion in the swarm.

As Vikir watched, he realized that the golem was an exquisite imitation of a real killer ant.

It must have been created by a skilled mage.

'Killer ants have a biocompass right here. If it breaks, it's over.'

This is a method of dealing with monsters that humans don't know about now and won't be discovered for another 20 years.

Before Vikir's return, humanity was puzzling over how the killer ants could find their way back home from such a long distance.

If they could figure it out, it would be a great way to bring back warriors who had fallen in the fight against demons.

And after countless years of tireless research, humans eventually figured it out.

Killer ants were known to find their way around by spraying pheromones or memorizing the shape of major landforms, but that didn't explain their ability to find their way home after a storm washed away the pheromones or an earthquake altered the landscape.

It has now been confirmed that even baby ants that have just left the nest for the first time are able to find their way home.

In fact, the killer ants' ability to navigate so precisely is due to a magnetic field compass built into their bodies.

No matter where they are, they can calculate exactly where they stand, where they want to go, and how many steps they need to take by integrating a complex function of mana along the way.

This extremely precise bio-compass, which can even detect polarization—the rotation of the direction of the force field when sunlight hits it—keeps the killer ants pointed in the right direction at all times.

And then.

Poof! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!

Vikir wasn't killing the ants; he was just picking them out and destroying their bio-compasses.

The killer ants, with their broken sense of direction, ran backwards, blocking the path of those behind them, and were crushed to death.

"What's next... Is it a soldier?"

Vikir lifted his head and stared at the giant ants in front of him.

How could he forget those murderous, heavily armored creatures?

The Battle of the Basin in the Great Colony, with so many casualties. That nightmare is in the anthill.

The monsters that had exploited the worker ants' weaknesses turned the tide of battle in an instant, baffling the victorious Allied forces.

'If you go down into the depths of the anthill, into the Catacombs, they scurry around like normal ants, though I don't know if they even exist today.'

The soldier ant is a dangerous creature, similar in danger rating to the hellhounds you've faced before.

It's so strong that even elite warriors at the upper ranks of the Sword Expert can't fight it 1:1.

But, of course, even such a beast has its weaknesses.

Just as you can trap a hellhound with chocolate, you can trap a soldier ant with a trick.

"You just have to find the right point."

Vikir focused his attention on the arrow.

He needed to concentrate even more since he only had to use the aura of an intermediate-to-advanced sword expert.

Of course, the gas aura used by the sword expert and the gas aura used by the graduator are on a different level in terms of their proficiency.

The same bread knife wielded by a child and an experienced chef will produce different results.

Shhh-

Vikir's gas aura flies in a dark red trajectory, like a cherry at the end of an arrow.

And it goes.

peo-eog!

It pierced right through the center of the soldier ant's head, instantly knocking the giant monster to the ground.

'The soldier ants are so realistic.'

Vikir smiled faintly at the sight of his single arrow.

'Their strength is their skull, which is broad and flat like a shield and specialized for headbutting.

Everyone knows this.

But paradoxically, few realize that the creature's weakness lies in its skull.

This sneaky ant hides its weaknesses in what should be its greatest strength.

"The powerful skull encloses the left and right brains separately. The only weaknesses are the connecting hippocampus and the cartilages that cover it.

The skull of the soldier ant is divided into two pieces, with the connecting link at the bottom of the center.

That soft carapace, about half the size of your little fingernail, is the vital area.

An ant that is pierced in this place collapses the coordination system between the left and right brains and dies, literally 'splitting in half'.

The body is still intact, but the neural and sensory networks have been destroyed, and the ant just lies there, unable to move.

Vikir stepped over the dead soldier ants and continued to fire arrows at them.

If there is an ant that breaks through the defense line and approaches, it mercilessly cuts off its neck with the dagger on its thigh.

His appearance was that of a veteran soldier who had spent decades on the battlefield, and with the mana of a sword expert, he was truly a military god.

...Puck! ...Puck! ...Puck!

The ants continue to die from the flying arrows.

By now, far more people were being crushed by their fellows than by Vikir's arrows.

With their bio-compasses broken, the ants are starting to run backwards, and with the corpses of the giant troopers in the way, the monster waves can't really get going.

Furthermore, the paralyzing poison that the ants spewed was being inhaled by the cubs, so it's no wonder that the poisonous fog was concentrated around Vikir.

Vikir climbed up the carcasses of the troopers as a rampart, wiping out the ants in front of him, and when he ran out of arrows, he moved forward to retrieve the ones in front of him.

He would then climb up the body of a soldier ant further in front of him and kill another, and another, and another.

Tudor, Sancho, Piggy, and Bianca, who were watching from the rear, muttered in a daze.

"This isn't a dream, is it?"

The third phase, the one that even third-year seniors struggle with, had already passed.

... but.

<Map: Killer ant colony 'Filthy Spawning Grounds'>

Join forces with your teammates to defend against the onslaught of killer ants!

Time remaining until the end of Phase 3: 0 minutes, 0 seconds.

1. Vikir

HP: 100/100

Kill point: 968

Assist point: 5,321

Vikir isn't just holding his own; he's pushing back the line itself!

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