Chapter 399: The Mad Ant Queen

Forget it. If she couldn’t figure it out, she wouldn’t keep trying.

The result was the same either way.

Pandora abandoned any further attempt to unravel the mystery.

A thought stirred in her mind, and the spell matrix for Rank-3 Wizardry: Conflagrant Breath took form.

The complex rune nodes flashed through her consciousness, snapping together in rapid succession to complete the circuit.

Pandora snapped her fingers.

The crisp sound echoed through the empty floor.

Everywhere her gaze fell, the ant queen was instantly engulfed in crimson flames.

Every inch of fatty tissue exposed to the air became a point of ignition.

The dying ant queen let out a piercing shriek, thrashing madly within the blaze.

Its massive body convulsed violently. With each contraction of its bloated abdomen, a burst of scorching gas erupted from the wounds.

The longer it burned, the weaker its life force became.

Its struggles diminished—from frenzied writhing to faint trembling, and finally to the occasional spasm.

Then, at some moment, the ant queen let out a mournful cry.

The sound was low and drawn out, utterly unlike the shrieking that had come before.

It was no longer sharp, no longer filled with rage and terror.

Instead, it carried something almost like desolation.

Even Pandora could feel the emotion laced within it.

Then the ant queen went completely still.

Pandora’s eyes flickered.

She snapped her fingers once more, and the flames died in an instant, leaving behind only a wisp of pale smoke and a floor covered in charred blackness.

Through the churning smoke before her, the ant queen had been burned to a crisp.

Its massive body had shrunk by nearly half. The fat and bodily fluids had been evaporated by the flames, leaving only carbonized carapace and internal supports maintaining a rough outline.

It did not move. It showed no reaction to Pandora’s approach. Its life force had weakened to the extreme.

At this point, Pandora was certain it no longer had any capacity to respond, so she approached without concern.

Only when she drew near did she notice—

The ant queen’s bloated body was arched and folded in a shape clearly different from any natural resting posture.

Its body was charred black, its carapace curled and cracked from the intense heat. Even so, the massive form still loomed like a scorched mountain of flesh across the center of the floor.

And its posture in death...

Its forebody was arched upward, mandibles touching the ground, abdomen and tail curled inward.

As if it had used its entire body to shield something.

Pandora leaped lightly onto the ant queen’s charred corpse.

The surface beneath her feet was brittle and fragile, like stepping on a crust of overbaked bread. Each step produced a faint cracking sound.

She walked closer and looked down.

It was an egg.

Thanks to the ant queen’s desperate efforts to block the flames with its own body, the egg had not been burned. Its surface still retained its original coloring, with no signs of scorching from the fire’s tongues.

Thus, it had largely preserved its original form.

It was an egg a full size larger than the Killer Ant eggs.

Roughly the size of an adult human, its shell a dull white, its surface covered in fine patterns.

But it was not an intact egg—

It was an egg that had long since shattered.

There was a clear crack across the shell, running from one side to the other, as if something had struck it from the outside.

The edges of the fracture were jagged and uneven. Several fragments lay scattered nearby. Whatever had been inside had long since drained away.

The egg itself had not been a dead egg.

Pandora saw the embryo right beside it, lying in the dried albumen.

It was a dead larva, incompletely developed.

Its form was something between an ant queen and a Killer Ant. The outline of a flattened, triangular head was faintly visible, but its compound eyes had not yet fully developed—they were only two shallow depressions.

Its mandibles had grown only slightly, like two half-formed scythes not yet sharpened to a fine edge.

When it had spilled out of the egg, it seemed to have still been alive, leaving faint traces of struggle on the ground.

But it clearly had not broken out of the egg on its own.

A larva that hatches naturally leaves characteristic marks on the shell from pushing out from within.

The cracks should radiate outward from the center, with fragments curling outward.

But the fractures on this egg had been inflicted from the outside.

The embryo had still been developing; even its life-support systems had not fully formed.

Something had clearly destroyed it from outside—

The shell had shattered, the embryo within had spilled out, and it had died from prolonged exposure to the air.

The albumen had completely dried, becoming a thin, translucent film spread across the ground, half-wrapping the dead larva beneath it.

From the dead larva, Pandora could sense lingering Rank-3 traces.

Weak as it was, the aura had a quality distinctly different from ordinary Killer Ants.

More condensed. Deeper.

Clearly a level above the common Killer Ants—even slightly surpassing the ant queen herself.

Calling it the “Egg of the Ant King” would not be inappropriate.

In other words, the ant queen had been gestating an ant king.

Before a certain point, the colony had seemed to function normally.

The queen had focused on incubation.

The colony had each performed its role—Building-Borer Ants gnawing through the structure to expand territory, Killer Ants patrolling and guarding.

Everything had run in an orderly fashion under some kind of structure.

But for some reason, from a certain moment onward, the queen had gone mad.

The entire colony had fallen into chaos.

The Killer Ants had broken free of the queen’s control, scattering and roaming, no longer guarding the nest.

The Building-Borer Ants still maintained a basic order but no longer responded to the queen’s commands.

And the Egg of the Ant King had been shattered.

After the ant king embryo’s death, the unclaimed life force that spilled out had happened to be captured and utilized by her wizardry, Susurrus Mist—which was why its duration had lasted somewhat longer than expected.

That was also why the mist had persisted all the way until her arrival.

Otherwise, with the Wizardry Crystal’s mana reserves, Susurrus Mist should have dissipated long ago.

Thoughts flickered ceaselessly through Pandora’s mind.

Countless fragments, driven by her immense mental power, attempted to piece together a complete truth.

This building still under construction had, in fact, harbored two anomalies from the very beginning.

One was this colony of “Building-Devouring Ants.”

From the materials the support squad had gathered, the earlier strange incidents in the building could be entirely attributed to the traces of the colony’s activities.

Except that, from a certain point onward, the ant queen had produced the “Egg of the Ant King” and focused all her energy on its incubation.

To minimize disruptions, the colony’s activities had been sharply curtailed. They no longer expanded outward, instead pouring all resources into the ant king’s gestation.

The construction site had thus returned to a brief period of calm.

That period without strange occurrences should have coincided with the colony’s withdrawal.

And what had broken that calm was the second anomaly—the “Underground Remains.”

That was the root cause of the recent deaths of dozens of people at the construction site.

Up until recently, the primary anomaly among them had in fact been in a dormant state, having no direct connection to the vast majority of incidents. It had only recently entered an active phase.