ATTACK ON THE ANT HOLE
This so-called fantasy world is actually a postapocalyptic world.
When Vampy realized this, she looked like she finally understood.
It certainly explains a lot.
Really, if you think about it, there were plenty of suspicious signs.
Especially Potimas’s cyborg body.
Mera, on the other hand, seems to be having trouble digesting this information.
Unlike Vampy and me, Mera is originally from this world, so it’s probably hard for him to keep up with all the new concepts like machines and technology, which he can’t even picture.
Seeing is believing, as they say.
Still, he seems to be doing his best to understand the Demon Lord’s words despite having little basis for it, and it’s not necessarily a big deal if he doesn’t fully get it.
We’re talking about the distant past, after all. It doesn’t really affect us in the present.
…At least, that’s what I thought at first.
The Demon Lord party walks through the wasteland in the dead of night.
When I put it that way, it sounds like she’s leading her troops on a march. But in reality, we look more like a bunch of young girls and one guy. Mera looks the oldest of any of us, but of course the Demon Lord is actually the oldest by far.
I guess in terms of appearance, I look the second oldest after him.
That doesn’t mean I look old, though! I just mean in comparison to the bite-size Demon Lord, the puppet spiders, and the baby bloodsucker!
I’ve got the same face I had in my old life, which means I look like a high school student, okay?!
Seriously, you’d be digging your own grave if you ever told a high school girl she looks old.
By the way, despite my looks, my real age in this world is roughly the same as Vampy’s, so I’m still a minor.
Unlike the Demon Lord, who might seem like a kid but she’s gotta be at least a thousand times the legal age of adulthood!
…What was I talking about again? I got a little carried away there.
As my mind wanders, my attention is suddenly drawn back.
Something’s entered the range of my Detection.
I use Panoptic Vision to peek at whatever it is.
At first, it just looks like an ordinary bird, but it can’t fool my Detection skill.
It’s a mechanical surveillance drone in the shape of a bird.
There’s only one person who would use something like that.
It must be a surveillance device sent by Potimas.
I activate Warped Evil Eye through my Panoptic Vision.
The space around the bird-shaped device warps, twisting and destroying everything within it. Including the surveillance bird.
The Demon Lord glances over at me as she leads the vampire–spider girl chorus.
I nod silently, and she nods back.
The reason I know Potimas isn’t just sitting around is that these surveillance devices have been showing up periodically.
And that’s been going on since we first started this journey after the Demon Lord defeated Potimas.
Every time I destroy them before they can get close.
Otherwise he’d get information about us.
By destroying them, I’m giving away our approximate location, but that would happen anyway if I simply left the drones alone and let them see us.
It’s better to destroy them and keep the amount of information Potimas gathers as low as possible.
Although the ideal amount would be zero, of course.
We’ve been trying our best to keep it that way, y’know?
That’s why we’re using all these routes so far from civilization, to try to keep out of his sight.
But for Mera to sustain himself, we do need to stop by a town or village once in a while.
It’s inevitable that we can’t quite keep completely out of sight in those situations.
Once in a while Potimas seems to lose track of us, and the surveillance drones will stop showing up for a long period of time. But at that point, he usually resorts to sending drones to anywhere we might possibly be just to find us again.
It’s not only Potimas, either. The Demon Lord said the pontiff of the Word of God religion tracked her down with similar methods.
The moment we decided on making the demon territory our destination, the possible routes we could reasonably take were inevitably limited.
No matter how much we try to avoid being seen, we can manage for only so long.
This latest drone was the first surveillance device that’s found us in a while.
I guess Potimas had this wasteland on his radar. Since we’ve been avoiding populated areas, he probably predicted we might come through here and set up surveillance in advance.
Still, even now that he knows roughly where we are, it’s not like he can act immediately.
Judging by his actions up to this point and his words when I ran into him back at Vampy’s mansion, Potimas seems to be the kinda guy who plans carefully before he acts. Also, he’s stingy.
He won’t pick any fights he might lose.
And we’ve got the super-powerful Demon Lord on our side, so he’s not going to come after us without a solid plan.
Especially when he can’t even spy on us successfully with his surveillance devices.
If he does attack us, it’ll be when he’s confident he can win.
That would probably be when he musters enough power to take the Demon Lord down or if something happens to put us in serious trouble.
If Potimas has the military strength to beat us outright, then we’re screwed. The only victory left for us would be successfully running away.
But I don’t think that’s the case.
It wouldn’t be easy to find something that can surpass the Demon Lord’s power, and if Potimas had something like that up his sleeves, he would’ve made his move ages ago.
Since he hasn’t done that, I have to assume he either doesn’t have the power in the first place or he does but he’s reluctant to use it.
The scary thing is that the latter could actually be true. That guy is so stingy that he didn’t want to use his machine gun in our battle because he hates wasting ammo. It’s not hard to believe he’d hold stuff back.
But there’s no point worrying about whether he has some secret weapon or not.
All we can do is be careful and not give him the opportunity to strike.
As long as Potimas thinks it’s too risky to attack us, he’s much less likely to try anything.
If I keep destroying his surveillance drones, it’ll give the impression that we’re not letting our guard down… I hope.
With my Detection skill, I can pick up on anything that’s approaching us before it gets too close, which means we always have the initiative, whether it’s getting the jump on a surveillance bot or a would-be attacker.
Find them with Detection, identify them with Panoptic Vision, and attack them with one of my Evil Eyes.
If it looks like a particularly troublesome opponent, I can just replace attacking with fleeing via Teleport.
Frankly, it’d be pretty tough for an enemy to get near me at this point.
Detection can even sense the signs of an approaching Teleport before it happens.
Sure, maybe a certain Demon Lord has managed to dupe me by moving so fast that Detection doesn’t even have time to notice, but that’s an exception, okay? A rare exception!
Besides, my Detection’s range has improved a lot since then.
At this point, I would notice someone approaching even at demon-lord speed, I think!
Although whether I’d be able to get away in time is another story!
Come to think of it, I could just use the Demon Lord as a decoy while I run away.
But my Detection range is big, and my speed is high as hell, so I’m confident I could escape just about any opponent if I had to.
By the way, the reason that my Detection range improved despite it already being maxed out as part of the mega-broken skill Wisdom is all because I wasn’t using Detection very well, turns out.
Actually, I guess the past tense might not be appropriate there. I’m still not using Detection to its max potential.
Detection is a crazy skill, containing all the Perception-type skills in one.
As a result, though, it’s so high-performance I can’t even process the information that’s coming in all at once.
Just like how humans aren’t really aware of every single thing in their range of vision, my brain subconsciously rejects seemingly unnecessary information, like the number of rocks on the side of the road.
In fact, if I don’t do that, I get a headache from the surplus of information.
But as it turns out, the range is basically limited only to how much information I can process.
In other words, if I’m able to process more, my range expands to match.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds.
My most obviously related skill, High-Speed Processing, is already maxed out. The only option left now is to raise my own innate processing power without relying on skills.
So I have to train my already skill-enhanced brain even further.
It’s like telling an abacus master to get better at calculating!
That’s not the kinda thing you can do in one day.
So I’ve been trying to unconsciously shut out any unnecessary details and focus on picking up only the most important information.
If I feel like it, I can check out the shut-out information, too, but it’s tiring to concentrate that much.
Like right now, for instance. If I really wanted to, I could tell there’s some kind of underground cave here.
Huh? An underground cave?
What’s this doing here?
But right as I finally notice it, Mera steps onto the patch of ground right on top of the cave.
While enduring the pressure of the extra gravity that my Repellent Evil Eye is putting on him.
I can barely manage an “uh-oh” before Mera breaks through the ground and starts to sink.
The thin part of the surface above the cave couldn’t take the extra weight.
The Demon Lord and company stop their reciting and turn around.
Peering down into the rubble, I can spot Mera, without a scratch on him.
With his heightened stats, falling into a hole doesn’t hurt him at all.
But it’s too early to be relieved.
I sense something approaching Mera in the hole.
An ant!
And not just any ant—this one is practically human size.
Turns out this cave is actually part of some ant-type monsters’ nest.
One by one, they start coming toward Mera, the intruder who’s busted into their home.
Still, these ants aren’t particularly strong. Their stats barely break a hundred, so Mera could easily take them alone. Sure, there are a lot of them, but I think Mera can handle it.
Hmm. Maybe I should let him fight the ants alone so he can level up.
But before I can enact my master plan, one of the puppet taratects—Ael, who’s sort of like the eldest sister among the spider siblings—hops right into the hole.
Ael is the most proactive of the puppet spiders and has basically become their leader.
Her tendency to act quickly means she also has a bad habit of stealing the spotlight.
Not to mention the tastiest cuts of meat whenever we’re eating dinner!
In other words, she’s my rival when it comes to mealtime.
But other than that, she’s smart and dependable.
She’s rushing to Mera’s aid right now, for example.
…She is doing it to help him, not just because she wants the experience points, right?
Knowing how crafty Ael can be, it’s totally possible.
Ael lands right on top a giant ant, crushing its head.
Then she unsheathes one of her swords with a slash, instantly slicing another ant in two.
Following Ael’s lead, the other puppet spiders run over to the hole as well.
Riel and Fiel jump in right away, followed by Sael after a moment’s hesitation.
Sael is the total opposite of Ael, a timid sort who’s treated like the youngest sister.
It’s a little worrying that she seems afraid to attack the ants, despite being far stronger than they are.
With that, the slaughter begins.
I mean, the puppet spiders are actually terrifying monsters with stats over a thousand each.
The ants’ stats barely reach three digits, so it’s no wonder they don’t stand a chance.
Sael keeps making frightened noises as she fights, but it’s only because she’s freaking out, not because she’s having any trouble.
The puppet spiders’ blades shred through the ants in no time flat.
As a result, while Mera managed to draw his sword, he didn’t even get a chance to use it.
The four puppet-spider girls high-five on top of the pile of ant corpses. It’s insanely surreal.
I feel a little bad for Mera and his unused sword.
At any rate, I head into the hole to collect the ant corpses.
As I put the bodies away in Spatial Storage, I use Detection to check things out farther belowground.
This ant hole is way bigger than I thought. It’s practically the size of a small dungeon.
The puppet spiders wiped out all the ants in the immediate area, but there are still plenty more deeper inside the nest.
Incidentally, these ant monsters are called efejicotes.
After a moment’s thought, I realize that sounds similar to the bee monsters in the Great Elroe Labyrinth. Those were called finjicotes, if I remember correctly.
Ants and bees… I guess they’re not dissimilar, but still, isn’t that kinda weird?
While I mull over some pointless things, I keep using Detection farther and farther down.
And then I stumble something a little bit intriguing.
“That was unfortunate. You all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine, thank you.”
“Oh good. Wanna come back up, then?”
Mera grabs on to the Demon Lord’s dangled thread and starts climbing.
But I start walking down the path toward the ants’ nest instead.
“Huh? Whiiite? Where’re you going?”
Ignoring the Demon Lord’s call, I keep making my way down the tunnel.
I can sense through Detection that the rest of the party is exchanging confused glances behind me.
But when I don’t stop, they hurriedly chase after me.
“Hey, paaal? Can you hear me, White? Why’re you going that way, huuuh?”
Don’t talk to me right now. I’m trying to focus here.
Hrm. I still can’t reach.
I’m too far away to tell exactly what it is.
I’ll have to go farther down.
I use Earth Magic to create a hole that goes straight down.
This shaft leads somewhere different than the ants’ nest.
I jump right in.
When I land, I’m surrounded by dozens of ants.
I can’t exactly read ants’ expressions, but they seem kinda surprised to me.
Using Cursed Evil Eye, I instantly finish off the ants.
Then, after quickly shoving the corpses into Spatial Storage, I make another hole going downward with Earth Magic.
Rinse and repeat.
At the bottom floor, I kill the queen and her bodyguard ants, but they’re so weak compared to me that they’re barely any different from the regular ants.
“What are you doing, White? I don’t know if you should be randomly destroying ecosystems like this.” The Demon Lord catches up to me, masking her confusion with a wry comment.
It’s not like I particularly wanted to kill a bunch of ants, okay?
They just happened to be in the way, so I took care of them, that’s all.
“Come on. Let’s go back.”
The Demon Lord tries to lead me back up, but I’m not finished yet.
My goal is still farther belowground.
I make another hole with Earth Magic leading below the queen’s area in the bottom of the ant nest.
“Whaaat?”
Realizing that I’m going even farther down, the Demon Lord lets out an irritated groan.
Everyone else seems less fed up with me and more concerned that I’ve lost my marbles.
Either way, I ignore all of them and keep digging farther down.
As she follows me, the Demon Lord’s face gets more serious. I guess she figured it out.
“White, isn’t this…” Her voice is more urgent than before.
Noticing her sudden change in attitude, the others get more serious, too, presumably realizing that I’m not doing this for shits and giggles.
All I do is keep digging deeper into the ground.
The Demon Lord follows me without further comment, with Mera, Vampy, and the puppet spiders close behind her.
Then, after digging for who knows how long, I finally reach it.
There, quite a bit deeper than even the lowest part of the ants’ nest, my destination comes into view.
“Wha…?”
As soon as she sees it, Vampy mumbles in awe.
I gotta admit, I get how she feels.
Because this is something you’d never expect to see here.
I use my Earth Magic to clear away the dirt that obscures it.
In front of us is a door.
A metal door, unlike anything I’ve seen in this world.
It might be possible to find metal doors elsewhere but none will ever be as perfectly crafted as this one.
This world doesn’t have the technology to produce something so advanced.
Much less to install it somewhere so deep underground.
So there we stand, in front of a door that shouldn’t exist.
Out of step with the current level of technology in this world.
The only civilization that could have made this is the one that has long since collapsed.
We’ve stumbled upon the ruins of something made by the ancient civilization the Demon Lord told us about, one that destroyed itself long ago.
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