The Third Portal: Chapter Twelve

I turned to assist Dusk with her own battle, but it was already winding down, with the desolants retreating the long way around the tunnel. I limped over to her, and only then did I look down and see that I’d taken a deep but clean wound to the leg. I hadn’t even realized that it had happened. 

I summoned a healing potion and doused my leg and the cuts on my arm with it, then began running Starfish Regeneration. The minty regenerative power rushed through me and set to work on the wounds. 

“You two okay?” I asked Dusk, who zipped over and sighed, saying that she was just tired. 

“Bully! Well fought! Let’s get rid of these, then track down the desolant queen!” the ghost of Markus shouted, and I pulled out a gourd, channeling power into it. 

“No. I’m not killing innocent myrmekes.” 

“Bully! Let’s kill these, then track the desolant nest down!” Markus repeated. 

My eye twitched, but he finally slipped into the spirit gourd, which I tossed to Dusk. She passed it into her realm, to the more powerful containment that Kene’s grandmother had given her. 

The soldier ants who had been holding the shields in place to concentrate the attacks began swarming over me, wiggling their antennae, and I caught several of them sending out their sensory pulses. The spells vibrated through me, and I shifted somewhat awkwardly, before the ants began releasing a new burst of scent over me. This one smelled vaguely sweet, but also rather oily, almost like a fried pastry hand pie. 

Understanding this one was a little bit more difficult, but maybe thanks to the fact that I was starting to put together their other scents, I got the faint impression of what it meant: symbiote.

I wasn’t sure how intelligent the myrmekes were. All of their scent messages seemed to just be single word impressions, but it was enough that my rudimentary understanding was beginning to activate the global monolinguistic spell and allow me to translate the scents, at least roughly. 

The thought left my stomach a little upset. Markus had claimed the desolants weren’t sapient, they had seemed utterly remorseless in their attacks, and they were trying to kidnap the grubs of these ants, but at the same time, a part of me was terrified that I’d just murdered a bunch of sapient beings. 

With as ants started slowly trickling out of the deeper chambers, the soldier ants set about working to repair the damage that our battle had caused to the anthill. All but one, which sat by me, bunkering down almost like the ones who had been in the strange resting chamber had. It seemed to be… napping. Or close enough to it, at least. 

The grave tender ants started pulling beast cores from the dead, then handing them off to workers, before heading down into the depths. It operated with an absolutely clinical efficiency, even as they dug in the bodies of the myrmekes that had fallen to desolants. 

Worker ants joined the soldiers in reinforcing the tunnels, and their spellcraft started to smooth and repair damage, then layer in spells that I could only determine were basic reinforcement enchantments of a sort. One of them examined the structural support beam for a while before casting layers of reinforcement around the damage as a stopgap measure and zipping off to go get more wood and replace the beam. 

All the while, as ants passed me by, they wiggled their antennae, scented the symbiote pheromone on me, then would pass by. Several of them gently batted at my leg or tail with their antennae in a friendly, almost handshake-esque gesture. 

Once about five minutes had passed, and the tunnels were mostly industrious and normal again, the soldier that was napping near me burst to its feet and started heading down the tunnel the workers had hid in. When I waited, unsure if I was supposed to follow or not, the soldier ant turned around and started dragging me along, spraying the symbiote pheromone the full time. I shook its mandibles off and started following on my own, which seemed to appease the ant. 

The first room that we passed by seemed to be a large food storage room filled with fruit, weird looking goop, piles of leaves, and even some cuts of near-rotting meat. Ants rushed in, ate something, then rushed out, continuing their ever-busy work schedule. 

There were two more food chambers, with the second and third being near empty. I was guessing that if the myrmekes had been being raided for a while, then there was a good chance that they hadn’t been able to store up a lot of food. 

Past the food chambers, there were a series of tunnels that led deep into the earth. Peeking in with a combination of Vampiric Senses and Surveyor’s Eye, I spotted the glimmering of what had to be gold, slowly growing. Ants sat there, waiting for it to reach a marker that they seemed to intuit, then would cut off tiny chunks and carry them up the tunnel. 

Following the mines there were a pair of chambers filled with grubs. Each of the grubs felt like first gate to my mana senses, and was being tended to and guarded by early second gate myrmekes. The tenders brought in one of the beast cores to the grubs, before cutting it into bits with its mandibles and slowly passing them around. The grubs began to absorb the bit of the core, and I marvelled at it. 

Humans weren’t born as first gate mages, like these grubs apparently hatched at, and we were also born with empty mana-gardens, rather than having biological arrays built into us. 

It meant there was no way a simple setup like this, where young people were given enough resources to create a solid foundation and then break through into second gate, would ever work for us. Human magic had too much variance, which in turn meant that you’d need a nearly infinite variety of resources to further each person’s development.

Still, a part of me couldn’t help but feel a bit of envy for the grubs. The simple potions and training that I’d been given in school had all been for ungated mana and mana manipulation. A freshly graduated ant would be stronger than I’d been a year ago, after all.

I shook off the thought as we passed by the next room, and my breath caught. 

I didn’t like to think of myself as a greedy person. I tended to treat money like the wind, letting it come to me when it wanted to, and pass me by just as easily. If I’d been greedy, I’d have remained as Orykson’s apprentice.

But even still, stepping into the myrmekes’ central chamber, I felt a strange twinge of greed in my chest. 

Gold was rare in Mossford, and since it was so critical to the development of industrial level enchantments, like the kind that provided lights, hot water, and plumbing, most of what there was wound up being bought and used by the government. That was why the standard coin was a silver, with ten silver being equal to a platinum, rather than a gold, which I’d heard some other countries used to use before mass industrial enchantments were introduced. 

Some places still had more or less gold, of course. Kamal had worn several bits of gold jewelry when I’d met him, which made sense for the son of the president of Suntorch. 

But up until that point, the most gold I’d ever seen in one place was when I’d attended one of the auctions held by the Ghost Market. There it had been used as ornamentation for the lights, to adorn marble pillars, and as crown molding on the roof. I’d thought that it was an audacious display of wealth. 

But he chamber of the myrmekes queen put paltry baubles like those in the displays of the Ghost Market to shame. 

The entire room was made of finely polished golden slabs. The tiles that I was standing on had been shaped into overlapping circles of gold, and there were literal pillars of gold holding up the roof. The shelves were made of more overlapping circles of gold to create flat planes, and the queen’s throne was a series of golden orbs adorned in a way that seemed uncomfortable to me, but was likely quite nice for the ants, and a pair of peak third gate ant guards stood by her, as much smaller, borderline nonmagical ants the size of loaves of bread crawled up to fertilize the eggs she was laying. The light emitted by the ant’s spells in the halls leaked in, bouncing around like wild and glimmering.

And on the orbicle – orbesque? Orblike? Orbius? – throne sat the ant queen. She was much larger and bulkier than the other ants in the colony, to the point that she was actually about the same size as I was. A quick sweep of my mana senses put her in the middle of fourth gate, and while her power was incredibly solid, it was also… strange. Her first and second gates seemed to largely match the blueprint that the rest of the colony used, with sensory spells, wall spells, some utility spells, and a single offensive earth spike.

But it was her third and fourth gate magic that was strange. A huge majority of it seemed turned internally, where I could feel an extremely complex beast core that intersected with what had to be her egg-laying organs. 

Not wanting to stare, I glanced around the room for any other details I’d missed. The shelves were simultaneously impressive and underwhelming. There weren’t many treasures on the shelves, but most of what there was fell squarely in the middle ground of power. Natural treasures that were suitable for third or fourth gate mages, with the odd fifth gate or higher treasure. A few of the treasures were telluric aspected, which made sense for ants, but a surprising number of them were actually time aspected, and I thought I sensed a spatial lodestone in there as well. 

A moment later, it clicked. Most of their resources for weaker mages were being funneled through the academy, and the telluric treasures could often be used by them. If the desolant colony was raiding them, taking young as workers, and stealing resources, then any treasures that had an obvious and direct combat use, like something to intensify flame, would be stolen. 

That left this unusual assortment.

The queen studied me, and I felt a vibration flow through the gold and onto me, as well as the magical senses of a more powerful mage poking around in me. The soldier next to me emitted the pheromone for ‘invader’, then ‘symbiote’, while poking at me with its antennae. The queen’s antennae waggled, and she focused them on me, before sweeping them to Dusk. She completely ignored Dawn, as if she couldn’t even see the dragon spirit. 

For a moment, I wondered if she would speak. The monolinguistic spell could translate a great deal, and I’d already begun to pick up on their pheromones. They had a degree of intelligence, even if not fully on the level of sapience that Dusk did. 

She instead emitted the symbiote pheromone again, then stepped off her throne and to the shelves. She picked up a few things in her mandibles, then piled them in front of me and Dusk, before releasing a series of highly complex pheromones that took me a moment to parse. 

Translating it was hard, since I wasn’t sure that even the queen could use more than a few dozen words. 

Still, with a bit of time and work, I thought I understood what she was asking. These treasures were for the two of us for being symbiotes. In other words, payment for defending her colony. 

But she had a greater offer. She wanted me to help her launch a counteroffensive.