I Hate Systems

A couple of hours ago, the moment when Enbi Arin first kicked on the ant's head.

Immediately, some memory fragments bumped into her head. Their content was blurry & incoherent.

Enbi Arin couldn't make sense of those fragments, they were kinda like the static experienced in old Televisions in her memory.

The ant was experiencing a similar event. But its intelligence & comprehension abilities were insufficient to be affected by these new set of memory fragments.

After that when the ant tackled Enbi Arin, it experienced another surge of memory fragments gushing into its brain. Enbi Arin immediately escaped from the ant's grasp before it could clutch onto her with its deadly mandibles.

After that Enbi Arin used her 'Attribute Juggler' ability to increase her agility in exchange by decreasing her might and started to dart around the ant while throwing in various punches and kicks at the ant.

The ant could barely keep up with the barrage of attacks but due to the decrease in the might of her attacks, the ant didn't take much damage as compared to the previous attacks dealt by Enbi Arin.

Every time they came into contact with each other, a bunch of memory fragments surged into their respective heads. Since this was her intention from the start, Enbi Arin maintained her intensity of attacks while the ant just ended up being on the receiving end.

The ant under such a barrage of attack could still at a few times counteract successfully which left various sorts of scratches & wounds on Enbi Arin. After approximately 15-20 minutes had passed, Enbi Arin felt her muscles go numb and start to spasm a little.

She secretly gritted her teeth and clenched her tiny fists and lunged at the ant with all her stats allocated to her agility. Just before she came into contact with the ant, Enbi Arin transferred most of her stats into might and with a little into toughness to withstand the backlash and dealt a powerful blow on the ant's abdomen that managed to crack its entire carapace.

This final attack worsened the ant's already existing internal injuries. The ant directly fainted due to exhausting its strength and willpower. Enbi Arin also directly fell atop the ant as she had overdrafted her muscle power due to which her muscles currently couldn't even provide any strength for her to move.

On seeing the huge influx of memory fragments gushing into her head like a torrential rain as she remained in contact with the ant, Enbi Arin silently closed her eyes while also fainting due to the acc.u.mulated exhaustion.Enbi Arin had a long dream, one in which she was just a tiny insect in a large ant colony.

Every day she began her routine by leaving the nest with her fellow ants. An ant scout usually left a trial of pheromones towards a prey which they reinforced with more pheromones while following the trial. Every day involved with fighting against some huge monstrous insect.

The ants with whom she ventured out may usually lose more than half of them within a day, sometimes leaving only her with a few handful of ants or survivors. They may lose only a couple of ants on days where prey is abundant with only a few predators to threaten them.

Since there wasn't any leader like ant in the colony, most of the work, building nests, scavenging & hunting for food, guarding & caring for the newborns were all done based on the instincts embedded in their genes & based on their primitive pheromone signals. But overall, the work efficiency was fairly high.

Day in & day out, it was the same work but in the body of the ant, Enbi Arin found out that she couldn't even understand the concept of boredom or laziness. It was as if those concepts were foreign to the current her. All she currently had in her mind was to hunt for food and survive.

The queen was the most pitiful of them all. She was forced to lay eggs and when she could no longer execute her work, she would be replaced with a newer & younger queen. But everything changed on that fateful day.

Every working ant suddenly saw golden dust that was approximately the size of their head flying everywhere around them. When one of said golden dust came in contact with their carapace, the golden dust was immediately absorbed into their bodies.

A couple of moments later, their entire surroundings were filled with pheromones implying danger, fear & death. It was followed by the popping sounds accompanied by the bursting of the various ants into blood mist.

All the ants were panicking. The current scenario was completely foreign to them. They didn't have any response to such a situation in their genetic traits or gene pools. The ants were furiously clamping their mandibles and scurrying here and there in total disorder. But one thing to compliment them was that, even in such a potential stampede situation, there didn't exist a single ant that was stamped to death by the other ants.

But none of these currently mattered to Enbi Arin since she saw all her co-workers burst into blood mist. It was at this time she knew that hope wasn't there. Their ant colony became history.

At the next moment, Enbi Arin was shivering out of fear when one of those dreadful golden dust got absorbed into her body. She resolved herself to death but after some time she noticed that she didn't explode like her fellow ants. Moreover, her carapace had a small golden glow over it.

Later Enbi Arin walked over the entire ant colony rounding up survivors & proceeding towards the depth where the queen resided. It may have been due to those golden dust influencing their behaviour but unlike before, the surviving ants clearly had a hierarchy established between them.

The two ants at the lead consisted of Enbi Arin at the front along with another ant walking side by side with her. The other ants followed them in a two-filed manner. Clearly, to them, the two ants were their leaders. Enbi Arin also noted that the strength of herself & the ant beside her which she came to mentally call as 'Ella' were a notch higher than the rest of the ants.

On the way to the depth of the colony, they came across the brood chamber only to find a mashed pulp barring no survivors which disheartened all the ants simultaneously. Shaking their head, they traversed further and finally reached the queen's chamber only to find the queen still alive and kicking.

The queen had strength which was a few notches higher than Enbi Arin & Ella. She also had 20 guards surrounding her, two among them were ants of similar strength as compared to Enbi Arin and Ella.

The moment they encountered the queen, all the surviving ants instantly submitted to her authority as a showcase of her strength by lowering their antennae.

It seemed that their method of communication still consisted of the use of their pheromones, but unlike before, they could communicate with more depth.

After the queen rounded them up, there were a total of 300 and something normal ants, 4 commander ants which consisted of Enbi Arin, Ella & the other two guard ants. The two guard ants were in-charge of the queen's protection along with 20 other guard ants.

Each guard commander ant commanded over 10 guard ants, while the queen assigned both Ella & Enbi Arin with 200 & 100 ants respectively. Ella was in charge of hunt and scouting while Enbi Arin was in charge of defense and recon.

The leftover ants were left to build bigger and stronger nests and also to take care of any new eggs that the queen may lay in the future.

Enbi Arin noticed that the more they hunted and ate the flesh of other creatures, the more their bodies were swiftly growing.

A normal ant was only one-third her size while the four commanders were almost two-thirds the queen's size.

Night time passed, when Enbi Arin was patrolling their nest along with the 100 ants under her command. Two lizards suddenly attacked them with two huge fireballs, each spanning over 2 metres in diameter.

The resulting fire and explosion instantly killed more than 20 ants assigned under Enbi Arin.

By the time the ants regrouped under Enbi Arin's command to counterattack, the two lizards chomped on the carcasses of the dead ants.

Meanwhile, after sensing the threat to the nest, the queen too joined the battle along with her guards. Even the worker ants who were building their nest and taking care of the newly laid eggs had to drop their tasks and join the fight because Ella and the 200 ants under her command were currently away from the nest.

The moment the ant queen emerged from the nest, both the lizards gazed at her with greedy eyes and lunged at her immediately.

The queen also retaliated by clamping one of the lizard's limbs or tail while headbutting occasionally to create an opportunity for the other ants to crawl over and attack the lizards.

The queen along with Enbi Arin and the other two guard commanders clamped a lizard to the ground and created an opportunity for the other ants to successfully clamp and tear off the lizard's flesh.

The other lizard threw fireballs one after the other incinerating at least 10 ants with each fireball.

Puffing up its throat and belly to its maximum limit, the lizard spewed out a 3-metre wide fireball towards the ant queen.

Among the entire ant colony, the queen was the only one who could currently use an innate ability, the other ants didn't even have enough Aria in them to invoke their innate ability.

Her antennae glowed a pale blue and a transparent barrier formed in the fireball's path. In the meantime, the queen gave a signal to all the ants near her and they immediately backed away from the injured lizard.

The barrier created by the queen could stop the 3-metre wide fireball for only 2 seconds before shattering into bits and pieces. The fireball travelled through its path and landed just a foot before the injured lizard and enveloped it in the resulting explosion and blazing flames which ultimately killed the lizard.

After that, the entire swarm attacked the remaining lizard. Thankfully Ella and the 200 ants under command arrived at the perfect time and swiftly killed off the last of the remaining lizard.

The total fatality count reached 48 dead ants. Thankfully the queen and her commander ants were mostly uninjured.

Further, during the subsequent day, their nest was attacked by 4 waves of lizards ranging from one lizard in a wave to three at a time in a wave which had also resulted in the highest number of ant casualties.

At the end of the second day, the queen successfully transitioned into the practitioner stage bringing joy to the colony but as a result of all the battles that were brought to their colony, they were left with only about a 100 ants in total.