Chapter 360 - Far Future, Ch. 70 ??? If There???s a Bustle in Your Hedgerow... (1/2)

The fast Leveling paradigm started with the ants.

The combatants had to have a Vajra, and both heat and acid resistance, because they were operating outside the city. Their rides had to be Shield-filtered to keep the alkali dust out of anything moving, and made from corrosion-immune materials, or it would be pitted and worn after only a single trip outside.

That was actually fine, as the Briggs and Rantha teams loved having stuff to work on to improve, and having more battlewagons, flitters, and transports able to traverse the wastes outside the city was hardly a bad thing from the viewpoint of the city. All such transports were registered and could be mobilized at need.

Naturally the BR teams were joined by eager G&G people eager for their Levels, and the BR squads were assembling their own crews of followers and Marktells to guide. They synched up using their Bands, unreliable as they could be in the charged dusts of the desert, but the Marktells had not failed as yet, and Marktells to Bands to Marktells relays using Marked left back in the city worked perfectly fine, if a second or two slower.

The ants of the Janus wastes were persistent, tenacious, and dangerous. The workers were about a foot long, and a silica-based lifeform, with mandibles that could shave away good steel, and multi-hued carapaces derived from the minerals found about their hives and the composition of the creatures they ate. They were the ultimate scavengers of the wastes, as well as a united force that could eventually drag down just about anything stupid enough to dare their swarms.

Those swarms were Karma mines.

The ant soldiers were three feet long, had glittering mandibles as hard as diamond, and poisonous acid-injecting stingers. They protected the workers who ranged over the wastes, looking for the living and the dead to dismember and haul back to the crystalline ant-hill for supplies.

The ants were scavengers and the primary prey of a lot of predators. Sand wurms picked them off and ran quickly, before they could be swarmed. The various scorpions snatched them up and scuttled away. Thunder beetles pulped them and munched away. Wyverns swooped down to snack on them. Quartz wasps zoomed in to pluck them up.

In return, if they were slow or stupid, the ants swarmed and ate them. They were fully capable of digging down after wurms too slow to get away, prying open the plating of any of their enemies, and tearing them apart.

The ants were the number one pest that kept trying to get into the city, with their hunters and foragers wandering up the walls and getting popped off continually by the automated defenses there, their bodies quickly snatched up by waiting wurms or scorpions checking regularly for such free morsels. If those weren't discrete enough, they were popped off by heavier wall guns, which brought in more ants to munch on them, continuing the process.

A marching nest, where the whole army went into motion to find a better place, was something that had to be blasted apart with sonic cannons or a lot of slugthrowers, as the ants were basically immune to heat and radiant energies. Sending vehicles after them was basically asking for disassembled and gnawed vehicles, and for the appetizers within to trigger death benefits.

Naturally, these incredibly dangerous little buggers were numerous, committed, largely fearless, still coughed up small nexals, and started a whole tide of encounters as they were killed.

Still, the scuttling suckers blew apart pretty quick under Hammers and Sun Strikes, and everybody got to practice their choice of missile weapons or melee combat. It was also extremely good practice for battling horde creatures, and yeah, Swarmbane Tokens were very quickly a highly desired thing.

Hammers crushed, mindclaws ripped, slugthrowers tossed Sun Shots, and ants in their hundreds were soon crushed and scattered across the glittering sands as everyone retreated steadily from the advancing swarm. The battlewagon drifted back behind them, providing covering fire to the flanks and emergency escape if something happened, as well as overwatch against the inevitable things coming to investigate.

”Wurm from the north!” barked out Corporal Kombu, seeing the blip pop up on the tremor sensor they'd put down.

”Woo hoo!” Kiapa Rantha called out, up for the first wurm to arrive. Her team fanned out in that direction as she stomped and made lots of noise to draw it in, mindclaws up to inflict the wounds that would keep it on the surface after it swallowed her.

Them teeth were gooooood money, and their Gear improvements had to come out of their own earnings, after all.

”Scorp to the east!” called out Carrie Rantha from her rotating top of the battlewagon, indicating where one of the ten-legged crystalline white scorpioids of this desert had shaken itself free from the sands, and was watching the dozens of newbies ant-slaying with great interest. ”We've a wyvern coming in from high northwest!” she added, eyes able to pierce the haze of the desert that foiled radar and kept sight lines down to a couple hundred yards. ”Looks like a two-headed type!” she added, as the sniper teams with their rifles turned and made ready to snipe, their guns already glowing with Nimbus light.

There was one normal type of wyvern, and four mutant versions. The normal one had pale underwings and belly, to match the haze from below, but its top and back were a riot of different crystalline colors, dependent on what it ate. The four mutant varieties were the Burning Wyvern, which basically breathed out a plasma lance; the Dazzler, which was semi-transparent and crystalline, and which could mesmerize anything looking on it in light; the two-headed variety; and the Spewer, which could vomit acid that could dissolve steel in seconds and whose blistered scales wept acid and poison.

The long rifles would take it down as soon as it came down out of the haze.

”Just got another wurm track northeast, and a rumble spot!” Corporal Kombu called out for everyone's benefit.

”Hooty-hoo!” Shiera Rantha called out, ready for some wurm teeth and inspecting the gizzards of one.

A rumble spot meant a thunder beetle had heard the ruckus going on here, and was trundling over to investigate. It was actually more millipede then beetle, with many underlying legs carrying along its armored shell, and capable of generating literal sonic booms that could pulverize carapaces, shred steel, and liquify flesh.