Chapter 46: Different Look
Mitch decided to be quite methodical in killing the ants. If he went too far without clearing the areas closest to the rat nest, chances are some ants would wander in and kill them all.
Therefore, he decided to start with the queens closest to the rats and move from there.
Without the main queen to lay more queens, Mitch didn’t feel as hurried as before. He took his time, searching through every nook and cranny to make sure he didn’t miss any of the ants.
Twenty days.
That was how long the queen had lived, more or less. It couldn’t be that dreadful, right? Surely there would not be more than twenty other queens for Mitch to find.
Wrong.
In the roughly seven days Mitch spent looking for queens, he counted no less than two hundred.
Unless there was some miracle, the other continents would be overrun by the ants in a matter of weeks. Maybe they were already conquered by the ants, since there was no one stifling their expansion.
Nevertheless, that was a problem for future Mitch.
As for the current Mitch, he was starving. He had kept his eating to a bare minimum during this week, satiating himself with regular worker ants in hopes of not absorbing any power.
And it worked. He was still in the early Infusion realm. At the same time, however, regular ants no longer satisfied him.
They provided the energy he needed to keep moving, but he just felt hungrier and hungrier every time he ate an ant.
His body was screaming for some high-quality feed.
Yet Mitch persevered.
The time he had to live was further cut down by every inch of progress he gained.
Being hungry was better than being dead.
In any case, Mitch was finally done. In a little under a week, he had killed all ant queens except one.
He hoisted the queen onto his back and carried it closer to the rats, much to the amusement of a certain someone.
"You finally decided to listen to my advice on kidnapping the queen, huh? I told you it’d work!"
The frustration he felt was overshadowed by the enormous amounts of relief from being done.
The last remaining queen, now called Emergency Food, was quite docile. It had noticed what Mitch did to its sisters and decided to play along for now. Not like it had any other choice.
That simplified transporting the queen immensely.
Even better news, his new weapons showed no signs of dulling!
Truly, the difference between Sparked and Infused material was massive.
After transporting the queen and providing it with some food to start laying more eggs, Mitch went back to the main queen’s chamber.
In any other scenario, the carcasses of the queen and the guards would have started decomposing. But the cool temperature from being underground combined with their strength when alive seemed to have preserved the meat perfectly.
He would have to make several rounds, but Mitch decided to take all the corpses with him.
Although he might not be able to progress further without consequences, the same did not apply to Hailey and Madeline.
The number of followers he had was continuously increasing, and the amount of Mynt he gained from them was also rising. Unfortunately, most of those followers were brainwashed, although they exhibited slight shifts toward more genuine prayers as time passed.
Still, the dirty Mynt had become overbearing. The only reason Mitch wasn’t throwing up constantly was because he was starving.
He needed his pure followers to gain strength to balance it out.
Transporting all the corpses back to where Madeline was took some time, but it was no problem at all.
Mitch looked around and found Madeline exactly where he had left her.
He had checked on her occasionally during his three-week-long expedition, but he had been in the caves the entirety of this week.
Her egg was shaking and cracking, just like Hailey’s had been. Though it did seem like there was a little bit of time left before she hatched.
Walking up to the entrance to the nest, Mitch knocked on the ground and whispered, "Hailey."
There was no response for a while, but eventually a rat came running out of the hole, eyes full of excitement and joy.
She jumped into Mitch’s embrace and started cuddling against his cheek.
It warmed his heart seeing her this happy to meet him again. He checked her stats and saw that she had finally reached the end of the Sparked realm, now blocked by the bottleneck.
"Hailey, go and bring some of the bravest and most loyal rats you know back with you, preferably the children of your penmates. It is time for some good quality food!"
Like Madeline, Hailey had developed some gluttonous tendencies. Drool dripping from her mouth, she skipped back into the nest and started assembling the food fighters.
"That poor girl, not realizing the pain and suffering you are about to put her through."
Once something Mitch found a little bit annoying, he now enjoyed Katherine’s teasing. Without her to converse with, he was sure to go insane from doing nothing but killing ants for a week straight.
A few hours later, Hailey was still nowhere to be seen. Though, there was something else that changed.
Crack, crack, crash
Madeline’s egg started breaking at an accelerated rate.
Mitch had preemptively brought it back to the ground when he arrived, afraid that Madeline would fall out of the tree when her hibernation ended.
In a very timely manner, Hailey too returned with four young rats trailing behind her. From Mitch’s connection to them, he could tell that three of them were pure believers while one was brainwashed.
It wasn’t the best, but he could only pin his hopes on the brainwashed rat displaying purer prayers as a result of meeting him.
Half an hour of playing and speaking with the rats later, the cracking finally stopped. Only momentarily, as in the next second, the entire egg shattered. Fragments shot in all directions, getting stuck in the treetops and digging into the ground.
Mitch protected the rats from the impact, which was much stronger than anything he was prepared for.
He had assumed that all transformations would be similar to Hailey’s—without any crazy effects.
Regardless, Madeline had now awoken and stood up, looking completely different from before.
