FREE USE in Primitive World-Chapter 253: Anchor Ant Queen Or Not?
The Commander didn’t resist. It allowed itself to be pushed back on its hind legs, its superheated mandibles dimming slightly as its antennae lowered in absolute, groveling submission to the proxy of the Queen.
Sol let out a long, shuddering exhale, the adrenaline finally crashing and leaving him hollow. His legs completely lost their strength. He dropped heavily to his knees on the hardened earth of the dais, burying the butt of his Void-Oak spear into the ground and leaning all his weight against the shaft just to keep himself from collapsing face-first into the mud.
Blood dripped steadily from his nose, his seared shoulder, the shallow cut on his stomach, and his weeping eyes, painting his chin and his armor a slick, dark crimson. His cracked ribs burned with every breath. He had never been so thoroughly, profoundly exhausted in either of his lives.
But as he forced his head up, a wild, breathless, completely victorious smile broke across his face.
He looked over his shoulder at the massive, slumbering form of the Queen. Her antennae were lowered again, her breathing steady, her formidable, ancient soul now wrapped entirely in the silver chains of his Domination power.
The link was established. It was heavy, terrifying, and felt like holding the leash of a slumbering, multi-headed dragon, but it was absolutely strong. He could feel it now... the vast, sprawling, infinitely complex network of the hive mind buzzing faintly at the very edge of his consciousness. It was a sea of thousands of connected minds, completely subdued, waiting silently in the dark for his command.
It seemed like he had accidentally acquired a standing army.
"Well," Sol coughed, spitting a glob of metallic-tasting blood onto the dais. His silver-crimson eyes swept across the frozen, terrifying legion of apex predators filling the massive cavern, all waiting with lowered antennae. "I guess I’m the Queen now."
...
The sheer, utter absurdity of the statement hung heavily in the humid, blood-soaked air of the Royal Chamber.
Sol let out a wet, hacking laugh that immediately devolved into a agonizing coughing fit. He spat another mouthful of metallic-tasting blood onto the petrified wood of the dais, his entire body trembling violently from the adrenaline crash. His dark leather armor was in ruins, melted and scorched, and every single breath felt like a serrated knife dragging across the inside of his chest.
He was at his absolute, biological limit. If a stiff breeze hit him right now, he was fairly certain his skeleton would simply dissolve.
But as he looked out over the sea of jagged mandibles, glowing runes, and hyper-lethal biological weaponry, the pain was entirely eclipsed by a rush of sheer, intoxicating euphoria.
The horde was his.
Sol needed space to think, and more importantly, he needed space to breathe without the suffocating heat of the Layer 2 Commanders pressing against him. He closed his eyes, focusing on the heavy, sprawling silver network that now tethered his mind to the millions of insects in the colony.
He didn’t speak aloud. He pushed a single, conceptual command down the hive-network.
*DEFENSIVE PERIMETER. LEAVE THE DAIS. GUARD ALL ENTRANCES.*
The reaction was instantaneous and flawless.
The massive Layer 2 Commander ant that had been frozen inches from his chest immediately lowered its head until its superheated mandibles scraped the floor in a gesture of absolute subjugation. It backed away slowly, its movements surprisingly fluid and deferential.
Behind it, the horde parted like the Red Sea. The thousands of rusted-red soldier ants moved with terrifying, mechanical precision, scrambling backward over the dunes of crushed royal eggs. They fanned out, forming a massive, multi-layered defensive wall around the perimeter of the cavern.
The colossal Layer 2 Commanders positioned themselves at the mouth of every single tunnel leading into the chamber, their superheated scythes raised outward, ready to instantly butcher anything that dared to enter.
Within thirty seconds, the massive dais was completely clear. Sol was left in peaceful, eerie isolation with the slumbering Queen.
"Okay," Sol breathed, allowing his grip on the Void-Oak spear to finally slacken. He collapsed onto his back, staring up at the bioluminescent mold clinging to the impossibly high ceiling. "Okay. Step one complete. Didn’t die."
He lay there for a long moment, simply listening to the rhythmic, thrumming heartbeat of the massive Queen beside him. The oppressive, planet-crushing weight of her ambient essence was no longer hostile, because his soul had completely subsumed hers, her aura now washed over him like a heavy, protective blanket.
The logical, progression-hungry part of his brain screamed at him to reach into his pouch, pull out the pure Blood-Jade, and anchor her soul immediately to secure the Layer 3 Lord Bloodline.
It was an incredibly tempting thought. In the biological hierarchy of any world, ants were universally renowned for their absurd, pound-for-pound physical specialties. Even a common worker could lift fifty times its own body weight, possess an incredibly durable exoskeleton, and exhibit terrifying coordination. A Layer 3 Sovereign... a literal super-ant... would theoretically grant him an astronomical, passive boost to his raw physical strength and defense.
But as he stared up at the patches of sickly bioluminescent mold clinging to the ceiling, Sol’s pragmatic mind began to break down the actual stats of the loot drop.
Her true power, the foundational core of her Layer 3 Lord Bloodline, wasn’t physical. Her body was bloated and practically immobile. Her specialty was entirely mental. And that heavily intersected with his own ethereal Silver Liquid... his ’Free Use’ Domination power.
The brutal truth of their competition had just been decisively proven. He, an unranked, newly awakened human running on fumes, had just violently overpowered and subjugated a centuries-old Layer 3 Lord in her own mental domain.
His Free Use cheat was fundamentally, inherently stronger than her highest-tier bloodline ability. Anchoring her soul might just give him a redundant, weaker version of a power he already possessed. He wasn’t too keen on wasting his only pure Blood-Jade on a redundant skill tree.
Besides, the Great Orrath had already provided far superior, more tangible alternatives. He still had two other prime candidates waiting for him on the surface. The colossal Lord Dreadwing and the Lord Great Badger.
Those bloodlines offered entirely new, devastating utilities that would instantly plug the gaping holes in his current arsenal.
Even though he would love to, he severely doubted anchoring the Lord Dreadwing would cause him to spontaneously sprout crystal wings from his back... the Great Orrath’s bloodline anchoring was a spiritual fusion, not a literal biological mutation... but it offered something infinitely more terrifying than basic flight. The massive Dreadwings were essentially apex, mutated dragonflies.
In the natural animal kingdom, dragonflies were the most lethal predators in existence, boasting a horrifying ninety-five percent hunting accuracy. Anchoring that soul could rewrite his nervous system to process visual information in fractions of a millisecond, granting him reflexes that bordered on precognition.
He could also gain the spiritual equivalent of its compound eyes... tens of thousands of microscopic lenses granting near 360-degree panoramic vision and flawless depth perception.
His physical agility could mirror their impossible spatial control: the ability to pivot instantly, shift momentum backward without losing balance, and execute flawless ambush strategies by calculating and intercepting a target’s exact trajectory rather than just blindly chasing them down. He would become an untouchable, hyper-lethal assassin.
On the other hand, the Lord Great Badger offered the absolute pinnacle of the physical vanguard tree. Anchoring that massive mammal would grant him an apocalyptic tier of raw, earth-shattering strength and an utterly absurd, biological tenacity. He had seen firsthand how the beast hardened its thick hide into indestructible stone spikes to shrug off waterfalls of acid, its bloodline naturally possessing a terrifyingly high anti-venom resistance that simply ignored toxic damage.
With that bloodline combined with the heavy density of his Golden Liquid, his physical defense would skyrocket. He would become a walking, impenetrable siege engine, capable of fighting through lethal, bleeding wounds without losing momentum and casually tanking concussive hits that would normally vaporize a human.
Both options were infinitely better than doubling down on a mental-essence skill tree he had already essentially mastered.
And then there was the most pressing, immediate issue: the aggro mechanics.
If he used the Blood-Jade on the Queen right now, he would kill her to extract her soul. If she died, the tyrannical Silver Liquid link tethering the hive-mind would snap.
