The Third Portal: Chapter Thirteen

I glanced at Dusk and Dawn, as well as manifesting Hannah, and we had a brief discussion. 

If I could manage to simultaneously get rid of an invasive species, get a portion of their loot, and restore the kidnapped myrmekes workers to their native colony, then I’d be happy to do so, but I’d promised Kene I wouldn't be running off recklessly, and I’d just driven off the voidlike greedy promises of one of my resolve roots. Given the things that Idyll had suggested might happen if I hadn’t… Well, it was best to keep myself balanced for several reasons. 

Plus, this was still a dangerous, largely wild and overgrown island. If a raiding squad of desolants was twelve peak third gate ants, then storming the nest might be well beyond my abilities. None of us knew what a class b threat actually meant, so with some reluctance, I created a spirit circle. 

As I did, the ant queen emitted a pheromone that I translated as ‘wait”. I conjured the blueshade. It took me a few minutes, but I emitted a similar smell from the blueshade. The queen emitted it again, and as settled back onto her throne to go back to her egg production duties, I summoned Markus

“Bully! Ready to mount some myrmekes on your wall?” the ghost hunter asked. 

“No,” I said coldly. “I’m not. I’ll release you to fight desolants, but we are not killing the myrmekes.” 

“What a prude. Don’t you understand that life is hard? You have to be–” 

He cut off, making a strangled sound as I pressed my mana senses into him, both of my Nascent Truths pounding through me as I did. 

“No.” 

“Fine,” the ghost wheezed. “What, then?” 

“What is a class b threat? I’m not familiar with the hunter bureau's ranking.” 

“Bah! You’re a member of the hunters, I can tell!” 

“I’m an auxiliary,” I said, not wanting to argue over the shift to the watches. 

“Even they know the ranking system.” 

“I was fast-tracked. I mostly just go by the gate of my opponents.” 

“Hrmph. Then allow me to instruct you on the ways of a proper hunter. The class system is designed to indicate what sort of team can take on a relevant threat. Class A threats, for example, require either an Occultist backed up by several supporting Arcanists and multiple spellbinder squads, or at least two full teams of five Arcanists each, working together, who are also backed up by multiple spellbinder squads. Class B threats require a couple of Arcanists, usually three, with support from a varying number of teams of Spellbinders. A desolant colony is a class B threat on its own, and can escalate to class A if they manage to form a supercolony.” 

I nodded as I processed that. Spell designs and magical theory as a whole had advanced a good deal since Markus’ era, so I wasn’t entirely sure the numbers were as applicable anymore, but even if each group of mages could be reduced to a single person, it meant the nest would require an Arcanist, with several Spellbinders playing support. 

A chill came over me as I imagined trying to charge an entire colony of the ants that were normally capable of taking on an Arcanist. The best case scenario would be escaping on my own, but I thought there was a good chance I’d have needed to pop my emergency escape talisman.

I thanked Markus, and this time he willingly re-entered his spirit gourd. I wiped away the circle, and started working on a message for the myrmekes queen. 

It took me a bit of time to respond with a complex enough signal of pheromones that she was able to understand my message, and it was slowed down even further by the fact that I was having to constantly update my collection of messaging scents. The queen seemed to have about fifty words that she was capable of using, which also slowed things down.

In the end, my response was more or less ‘wait, symbiote symbiote, symbiote defend, symbiote symbiote attack’, and I wasn’t entirely sure if the queen understood what I was saying or not, but she didn’t try to interfere with us, and allowed us free reign to wander around the colony without the other ants bothering us overmuch. They did stop and probe us with their antennae a fair bit, but I took it to be a greeting gesture, almost like a friendly wave or nod. 

I glanced at Dusk and Dawn as we left the queen’s chambers, clutching the handful of things that the ant queen had given us. There wasn’t much, not when compared to some of the hauls that the smallfolk had given us, but there was honestly more than I’d been expecting. 

The first one looked like a clump of dirt, but to my senses, was a lot more complicated. It was woven with familiar tendrils of life and death energy, but both of them had faded. The death energy was swirling in loops with minor knots of abnegation, seemingly keeping the entire thing in a dormant state. Within those looping seals was where the threads of life energy were the most concentrated, as well as a great deal of time energy, and smaller flecks of knowledge and mental.

Fungal networks could lay dormant for years, sometimes even decades, waiting for the right time to awaken and begin growing, and I was guessing that this fungi was currently doing the same. It didn’t feel like most of its power was bound up in specific effects, but rather, was loosely gathered throughout the network, preparing to bloom. I couldn’t be sure, not without some analysis and cross referencing, but I thought that this was probably a temporal mana source. 

If so, I was delighted. I had plenty of plants that I could drain for life mana, and between the pointer moss, transivy, and my Harvest Distance spell, I was rarely in danger of running out of spatial mana. I’d even been able to breed out enough blood carnations to take care of death mana, at least for a time, and the Coalheart helped it recover faster as well. 

But for temporal mana, I had the emperor’s tree, and… that was it. I could restore it with soul mana, and once I was skilled enough with the Hudau Heart spell, I could probably use that to improve the rate of recovery, but that would just be taking from the other sources.

I doubted these random time mushrooms would be some sort of Fungal Echoheart or the like, and in fact I doubted a treasure like that even existed, though if it did, I absolutely wanted it. But even as just another mana source, it could ease the burden on the tree an enormous amount. 

The next item that I’d been gifted was a long, thin chunk of jade. It was heavy with telluric, creation, physical, mental, and knowledge energy, but there was also enough of the other mana types that it felt most like a cavern dragon item. The power was clearly bound up to some sort of effect, but none of us knew what it was, so Dusk stored it in her vault. It had so much stability and earthen power that there were good odds that Ed would be able to get some use out of it, after all. 

The third item was a rock that had been carved into a shallow bowl and filled with a shifting, glowing purple dust or sand that felt complex and strange. Dusk thought that it might be able to enhance her Sandstorm Lance spell, though none of us knew how it would do that. Still, the shape and rough feel of the mana seemed very sand-oriented, though with a surprising amount of knowledge mixed in. It seemed as likely as not to be able to help her, so she put it in her vault for later appraisal, next to the slab of jade. 

The fourth and final item was the most boring one of them all, but also possibly the best: a nugget of mundane gold the size of a cherry. I wasn’t sure of its purity, or if it was solid all the way through, or anything else about it, but I did know gold was very valuable to enchanters, which made me suspect that it would fetch a good price. Dusk immediately tucked it away in her vault with the other two treasures, leaving me with just the dormant mycelial network. 

I flicked open a portal to Dusk’s realm, locating it near the emperor’s tree, and began planting the network around its roots, since I figured the influx of temporal energy would help it start growing, then used Fungal Entwinement to send a mix of life, death, and time mana into the network. 

Nothing bloomed right away, but that was fine. It had clearly been dormant, and it might take a while to get a recovering source of energy enough to bloom. 

A few of the ants poked their heads into the portal warily, and then sent out sensory spells and layed down scout trails, but having the portal opened in the middle of their colony left them incredibly cautious and wary, so I closed it after only a short while. 

“Alright,” I said, cracking my back after I’d been bent over, gardening. “Dusk, why don’t you fly as fast as you can back to Port Heliodoor. Report to Edgar, if you can, and if not, see what Arcanists are willing to listen to you. I’ll stay here and defend the colony from attackers.” 

Dusk made a river-burbling sound of agreement, and began reaching for the assortment of bird, insect, and estragon spells within her realm, layering them on her to improve her flight. It probably wouldn’t be quite as fast as my teleportation, but she’d get there fast. Dawn sent a curious thought, and I shrugged. 

“Go with her if you’d like.” 

We said our goodbyes, Dawn slipped into Dusk’s realm, and Dusk blasted away, not quite moving at top speed through the tunnels, but still going fast enough that it was impressive.

“Why are you not going?” Hannah asked as I started walking down the halls of the anthill. 

“Three main reasons,” I said. “First is my sensory capacity. Within Dusk’s realm, her senses are a lot stronger than mine, but out in the normal world, I can cover a lot more area than even she and Dawn together would be able to.”

As I spoke, I unfurled my senses out around me. I could easily blanket the entire nest, though it was pushing out in enough areas that I lost some fine details, and couldn’t get far outside of it. It should still be an early warning if the ants returned, though.

“Second, I’ve got a Nascent Truth of the Guardian and of Benevolence, while Dusk has the Nascent Truth of the Worldspirit, and Dawn… Well, she’s got something, I won’t claim to understand it. But yeah. It’s a minor advantage, but my resonance should be working in concert while defending the nest.” 

I began walking through the long tunnel that the fight had taken place in, and drew on my temporal and death mana, preparing to cast a spell that I might have overly neglected, as well as two that I used a little more often. There was another spot in the colony that might have what I needed, but I would start here.

“And third, I might not be much of an ectomancer or a psychometer, but I am a little bit of both. And I happen to know a place that’s going to almost certainly be full of vengeful dead. Even if nonsapients, or semi-sapient beings like the ants, don’t tend to leave behind ghosts that are as powerful or developed… I have options.”

I placed my hand on the smooth tile floor where ant defenders had fallen and channeled Lesser Psychometry, Lesser Image Recall, and Analyze Death.