Elder Cultivator

Chapter 959

Jealousy was unbecoming of a void ant. That was why the Sergeant was not jealous of her brother’s ability to fly. Instead, she was concerned about her own lack of ability in that area affecting the mission.

“Strange,” she commented to him as their ship continued onward after a shot stop on Kathariel.

“What is strange?” the Son of the Queen signed in return.

The Sergeant shook her head. “Normally, only humans pay much attention to their siblings.”

“Are you referring to our relation?” he asked. “In truth, you actually mean that as void ants we don’t tend to acknowledge anything but the queens. And even then, we don’t think of them as our mother. But in fact, while humans are our first exposure, do not most of the people of Akrys acknowledge family to some extent? Even some of the insects.”

The Sergeant thought for some time. “I suppose that is true. But if I were to be honest, I had actually thought about family before. Just a sister, instead of a brother.”

“Who would that be?” the Son of the Queen inquired. “I have not heard of any other… particularly independent members of our family,” he said, choosing his words carefully.

“You would be correct, as far as I am aware,” the Sergeant admitted. “I don’t know why, but I had the thoughts about a human.”

“Anishka,” he declared.

“Well, yes. But though we are… friends… I don’t know why I would think something impossible. We are not even the same thing. Obviously we are not sisters.”

“For someone who has been around humans for centuries, you sure are bad at understanding them.”

The Sergeant’s limbs flailed rapidly. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

“It is the natural thing for humans to think when they are close, that people are family. You must remember that humans can become family, not just be born into it. Through marriage among other things.”

The Sergeant fiddled around with her antennae for a bit. “I forgot you have a unique perspective on such things.” They were still for some time, then her curiosity forced her to continue the conversation. “So how did you grow wings?”

“My wings grew in naturally,” he explained. “I simply did not lose them until my mission. Then, I grew them back as I recovered.” He turned to show her the still-melted parts of his carapace. “As you can see, not everything did so well.”

“... And how did you get so big? I am more than twice your age.”

“I think you should know this well enough by now,” the Son of the Queen replied. “Void ants are responsible in part for our own development. You would only be slightly smaller to begin with. Perhaps you never found a reason to become large.”

“It helps with opening doors,” she commented.

“While I understand that they can be annoying… that is still quite situational. For our current mission, we shouldn’t need to be concerned with that very often. Especially since we will have proper equipment.”

“It’s strange,” the Sergeant commented, thinking about the devices that had been made for them. “To feel something that is not one of us, but has no hint of natural energy.”

“Well, in some ways they are us. The outer surfaces are void ant chitin, after all.” That was the best way to keep anything from detecting oddities of floating little devices. The fact that they would otherwise function on technology was critical as well, so there would be no fluctuations of natural energy for their enemies to pick up on. Apparently, they were quite skilled with formations.

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The mission given to the Sergeant and the Son of the Queen was one of critical importance. The Great Queen might have done it herself, but her infiltration ability was somewhat hampered by her size. She could not squeeze through tiny cracks or open miniscule holes in barriers. She could likely open any barrier and rend open walls in her way, but that was much more obvious.

Thus, the mission had been assigned to the two of them, as experienced individuals who were good at ‘independent operation’. In short, they didn’t really fit into the normal structure of void ant society, but had been successful in the past.

They were also being shipped with some subordinates. A sufficient complement for them to work with, though the devices they had were extremely limited. They had to be custom made to specific dimensions and at a very small scale, with precision difficult for even void ants to achieve by hand. Human ‘technology’ worked with very small distances, but this had to be capable of its task while still being tiny.

The task was, in this case, scanning documents or recording verbal exchanges. They were to infiltrate Turilia to learn of the Numerological Compact’s plans, or more about their knowledge or… pretty much anything useful. There was no clear duration for their infiltration, they simply had to do whatever it took to provide an advantage for their allies.

That meant finding good information- including understanding that it was valuable- and transmitting it to them. That was the final function of their devices, since it turned out carrying documents off-planet was extremely difficult.

Stolen novel; please report.

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Lower Realms Alliance scout ships rushed past Turilia, keeping enough distance that they were safe but taking advantage of their speed and mobility to make brief scans of the planet. That was what the enemy was meant to see, at least. The small capsule that drifted towards the planet went unnoticed, carrying the void ants to the edge of the planetary barrier.

Then they chewed their way through the barrier, creating a hole not much larger than a fist- yet that still allowed room for hundreds of them. They dropped through the barrier along with the capsule, which shot off in a random direction- the sacrifice, should anyone have noticed a fluctuation of the tiniest fraction of their planet’s surface area, potentially less than one quintillionth of the total. The actual loss in energy might be more relevant, as the barrier tended to maintain the energy in place, except that even then it lost a measurable portion naturally.

Even so, they didn’t want to risk their people and the mission, so the decoy dashed away. Then the ants dropped towards their landing site, a small spread of them holding onto each other. Since the Son of the Queen actually had wings, they were able to control their landing relatively well.

They were infiltrating the place with the best formations they could find, on the assumption that the enemy would want to protect their most important information. But if they were wrong, there would still be something of value. Or they would move on to another location, as necessary. They could hitch rides on human vessels to end up elsewhere on their planet much more quickly than they could walk or otherwise traverse as ants.

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“More calculations,” the Sergeant complained silently. “Why don’t they put these things in a computer? We could download them all at once.”

Nobody was watching to answer her, though it would have been fairly straightforward. They had something else that fulfilled the same job well enough… and methods had to be stored somewhere. Of course, not everything that had calculations would be useful.

The Son of the Queen was nearby, poking his head between papers that spoke of large ships. It was difficult for him to comprehend the scale, but fortunately he just needed to know the sizes of Magnitude III and Magnitude IV ships. Despite the names being technically true in terms of volume and cultivators involved, the latter were only a bit more than twice the dimensions in any particular arrangement. Though some were oddly shaped.

The void ants had chewed through so many formations to reach their current position, and their enemies seemed none the wiser. If everything was going well, they would not even know void ants still existed- though there was a decent chance they would have that information.

The theoretical path would travel from the Trigold Cluster’s forces in the lower realms- especially what had broken down into the Free Planet Guardians and the Adamant Federation- to their forces in the upper realms, potentially to the Exalted Quadrant and then back down to the Numerological Compact.

Hopefully, enough information would have been lost that there were no nasty traps for void ants. Though the group had been trained on how to deal with the most likely counters that their own humans could think up. With the Numerological Compact only being exceptional in terms of formations, it was very difficult for them to threaten void ants who were in large part resistant to the effects. Merely detecting them would be difficult, and they knew what such formations might taste like. It was just like human cultivators learning how to destroy formations, finding their weak points- they didn’t necessarily have to understand how they worked to deal with them.

The humans seemed oblivious. Not just to the void ants’ presence, but to the very idea there might be someone infiltrating. Their guards were wholly inadequate. Though perhaps they were looking for human sized opponents. Or maybe locust sized ones, now.

For all that the surface of the Numerological Compact was spic and span, their buildings shiny and precise… under their floorboards and inside their walls they were just as dirty as anything else. There were a million tiny cracks to slip through, and their formations usually forgot about them.

The Sergeant scanned another document. That one said something about a large scale destruction formation. That was bad, right? It wasn’t clear if it was purely theoretical, but she had to keep scanning this whole group.

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Day by day, documents were coming to the Alliance from Turilia. Given that the receiver for the scanning devices had cost as much as a modern Ascension-class battleship, they really needed to achieve something. The devices hadn’t been made with the Numerological Compact in mind, but rather had been in development for a while. This was effectively a field test.

The Great Queen had nothing to do with parsing the documents herself, but she was kept apprised of the results. She was concerned primarily with the continual flow, indicating her people were still active. Previously, she had to wait for retrieval to know if they even survived. And while normally she didn’t care about individual void ants… that had changed slightly over the centuries. Those who chose to be individuals deserved the recognition of their existence.

Meanwhile, a large number of formation experts were paying attention to the technical details of the documents. To the Numerological Compact Formations were everything, required for the functionality of their ships and their cities. The same was true for the Alliance to a certain extent, but they also had technology that worked apart from formations- and they also counted on the individual abilities of cultivators. At a certain level, cultivators could outclass even the best made formations.

Few of the documents revealed any current plans by the Numerological Compact. For the most part, they were from before the war even started. Valuable data for dealing with them, perhaps, but not likely to affect the war as a whole.

That was until they saw information on adaptive barriers. That was the point at which they wished they had the ability to contact their infiltrators, because not only were adaptive barriers dangerous… that was their own development. Well, they had mostly stolen it from the Sylanis Cluster, but the point was that the Numerological Compact was learning it. Which meant that the void ants had finally come upon current information. Hopefully, they would recognize that and continue to look for more of the same.

Of particular note was the analysis of certain energy patterns. Without knowing how the enemy classified things they couldn’t replicate the energy patterns to determine who was being analyzed, though they could make some assumptions from surrounding information. Devon was certainly on the radar of the Numerological Compact. Perhaps Endymion’s battle with him had been at least partly for that purpose.

It would be somewhat problematic if the enemy implemented widespread use of adaptive barriers, but it would also be extremely expensive. No matter how high the expertise of the Numerological Compact, implementing new details into their already overloaded formations would take significant time and resources. They could sacrifice one for the other, of course, but the integration wouldn’t be instantaneous.

That meant that if possible, the Alliance would want to keep up the pressure on their planets. If they could keep taking out their Confluence cultivators and their ships, their new formations wouldn’t matter since there would be nobody to use them.

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