Chapter 46: Ants

Chapter 46: Chapter 46: Ants

Reeve stepped forward, slamming his shield into the ground. A wall of stone rose in front of the group.

Thud!

The ant crashed into it.

"Now!"

Skyler’s arrow whistled through the air, punching clean through the ant’s head.

Thunk!

It dropped.

Another took its place.

Then another.

Jason set his feet, breathed once, and lunged.

His spear drove forward and caught an ant in the joint between head and thorax. The carapace resisted, then cracked, then split.

Crunch!

’This thing has a tough shell but not that tough.’

He ripped the spear free and turned, sweeping the shaft in a wide arc that knocked two ants into the wall.

Fire flickered along the tip.

Not much. Just enough.

Hiss.

The ants shrieked.

Reeve laughed somewhere to his right. "Not bad, kid!"

"Thanks!"

Another ant leapt.

Jason sidestepped, drove his spear through its belly, and kicked the body off.

Behind him, Wen’s healing essence washed over a scratch on Reeve’s arm, closing it in seconds.

"Thanks, Wen!"

"Stop getting scratched!"

Click. Click. Click.

They kept coming.

---

An hour in, Jason had stopped counting.

His arms ached, his breathing was heavy, and the fight had settled into a steady rhythmic.

Thrust. Pull. Crush.

The ants swarmed from the side tunnels, forcing the team into a tight formation.

Reeve held the front. Skyler picked off the ones climbing the walls. Wen kept everyone upright.

"How many is that?" Skyler asked, loosing another arrow.

"Stopped counting," Reeve said.

"Same," Jason said.

"I’m on forty," Wen said.

"You’re lying."

"I’m rounding up."

And Jason?

Jason fought like a man who was being very careful.

Because the truth was...

’This is too easy.’

He kept his Veil in place.

First Level. Intermediate Stage.

He kept his Fire and Lightning bound, using only what a man at that level should be able to use.

And still, it was easy.

The bloodline did most of the work. His arms never really tired. His legs never slowed. When an ant landed a hit, the bruise faded before the pain finished arriving.

He did struggle, a little. But he always had his higher cultuvation to fall back on so his life was never really on the line at any point throughout this fight.

The swarm was big, and the ants never stopped coming.

But the struggle was a thin thing.

Like walking through shallow water.

---

The boss was a bigger ant.

Not much bigger. Maybe twice the size of the rest, with a thicker carapace and a pair of mandibles like garden shears.

Reeve took the first hit on a stone shield.

Crack!

It held.

"Skyler!"

"On it!"

Her arrow punched into a seam in the shell. The ant shrieked and reared.

Jason moved.

Sun Shift, tuned down to a whisper. Just enough to cover the distance.

He drove the spear upward into the exposed underbelly.

Crunch!

The boss ant went rigid.

Then it collapsed.

Silence.

For a long moment, nobody spoke.

Then Skyler lowered her bow.

"That’s it?"

"That’s it," Reeve said. His chest rose and fell. "Two hours, give or take. Clean."

"Two hours," Jason said. "The bell’s already rung."

"Then the kids made it home," Reeve said. "Which is the whole point."

Wen wiped her forehead.

"I’m never eating anything with legs again."

"You ate crab last week," Skyler said.

"That was before."

---

They harvested the cores as quickly as they could before the gate’s energy would destabilize and it would close for good.

That process took much longer for higher ranked gates than lower ranked ones. There was just more energy that needed dispersing.

A gate this weak would have all its energy dispersed in less than 3 hours.

As for the cores, there were small ones, mostly. Dull brown stones about the size of a thumbnail, with the occasional bigger one buried in the boss.

"Split it the usual way?" Reeve asked, weighing one in his palm.

"Fine by me," Jason said.

"You barely took a scratch today."

"Lucky, I guess."

"Hm," Reeve said, and let it go.

Jason cracked shells and pulled them out, working in a quiet daze.

’So that’s it.’

He had known it, in the back of his head, ever since the Labyrinth.

Now he’d confirmed it.

Gates like this were not going to make him stronger.

Not anymore.

They could pay the bills to a decent extent.

They could even keep him busy. But they couldn’t push him.

’And I need to be pushed.’

The system only rewarded him for killing things above his level. He needed bigger fights. He needed real danger.

’D-Rank. C-Rank. Higher.’

But he couldn’t just walk into those Gates.

Hunter ranks followed cultivation. F-Rank meant First Level. E-Rank meant Second. D-Rank meant Third.

And the rule was simple. A raid party needed at least one member equal to or higher than the Gate’s rank to be approved.

That was how he, an F-Rank, was allowed into E-Rank Gates.

There was always a stronger member in the party to cover him.

There was another rule. The rank difference between any individual member and the gate should never be more than a single rank.

He paused, a core halfway out of an ant’s skull.

And he was Second Level already.

He just wasn’t registered as one.

The idea settled into his mind, quiet and obvious.

’Not as Jason Veryon.’

Jason Veryon was First Level. Jason Veryon was a failed prodigy limping along on partial recovery. Jason Veryon had a father who might be watching.

’But what if there was someone else?’

Someone nobody knew.

A second hunter, a second name, a second level.

He pulled the core free, tossed it into the bag, and kept thinking.

---

The walk home was slow.

The sun had dipped low, casting long shadows across the school field. A few students lingered by the gates, laughing, oblivious.

Jason watched them go.

’Good. Nobody got hurt.’

He tugged his jacket tighter and kept walking.

The plan began to take shape.

He needed the persona to be believable. Which meant he needed it to be ordinary.

’Ordinary. Forgettable. Not interesting.’

Dual affinity fighters were rare.

Fire and Lightning together would stand out like a flare. If anyone in the Veryon clan ever caught wind of a second hunter with both, they’d look at Jason, then look at the persona, then do the math.

’So, no.’

The persona would use Fire alone.

A single affinity. Clean, simple and common enough to blend in anywhere.

Then there was the weapon.

The spear was out of the question. Too many people had seen him fight with it. Skyler, Reeve, Wen, Darius, and a large chunk of the Labyrinth expedition.

Something else, then.

He thought about it for exactly three seconds.

’A sword.’

He had trained with one when he was young. Back when his teachers praised him as a natural across every weapon on the rack. His hands still remembered the grip, the balance, the way a blade moved.

It wouldn’t be a new experience.

And the translation would come with time.

’Crimson Blaze is a spear art. But fire is fire. If I can reshape the flow, I can make it work on a sword.’

It wouldn’t be easy.

It would take weeks, maybe months, to get right.

But he had time.

And he didn’t have to worry about finding the blade.

He already had one.

Sitting in his inventory, quiet and heavy.

Kane’s sword.

A D-Rank weapon, taken from a man who had tried to kill him.

’Poetic.’

Jason smiled, thin and a little crooked.

’Sorry, Kane. Your sword’s going to be doing some freelance work.’

The streetlamps flickered on one by one.

Somewhere behind him, the Gate’s last glow faded into the evening.

Ahead, the house waited.

Warm light in the windows. A pot already on the stove, most likely, because Judith couldn’t stand an empty kitchen.

And Novaria.

Probably pretending she hadn’t been checking the clock all afternoon.

He picked up his pace.

There was a lot to plan.

But first...

He needed to figure out what he was going to cook.