Eaten Ch.87

Chapter 87: Like a Snake’s

No sooner had Wu Heng spoken than countless bright yellow legs emerged from each ant nest. One head after another pushed out, their antennae lifted high, waving, communicating.

“What… what are they doing?” asked a bald man. He wiped his head, which was slick with sweat.

“They’re passing messages,” Yue Shanqing said softly, the pale feathers on his face flickering faintly in and out of view.

Xie Chongyi lightly scratched the back of Wu Heng’s hand with his finger from below. “I suspect Wu Dian already knew where the ant nests were and deliberately found an excuse to slip away.”

“Reasonable enough,” Wu Heng replied, scratching Xie Chongyi back.

It was always a delight to be so in sync with one’s food—but the timing right now couldn’t be worse; there was no chance to celebrate.

“They’re coming down!!!” someone shouted in panic.

Yue Shanqing’s eyes narrowed into long slits, the corners darkening like thick ink. The black spread toward his temples, and then his body suddenly lengthened. His human form vanished—replaced by a white crane shooting into the air like a falling star in reverse.

The crane’s wings flung open wide, its path sharp and unpredictable through the dense forest.

With a rapid series of cracking sounds, several yellow crazy ants crawling down the bamboo were sliced cleanly in half.

Severed ant limbs rained from above. Hot, metallic blood and sticky fluids splattered through the air, mixing with drifting shreds of crushed leaves.

With a piercing cry, X launched upward. The yellow crazy ants had swarmed out in full force, darkening the sky.

X and the white crane burst through the golden tide, but their wings were clinging with ants. The creatures hammered their sharp mandibles into the birds’ down, biting again and again.

Fortunately, the feathers of both mutated birds had evolved to extraordinary hardness. With a single shudder, the feathers clattered together like overlapping scales, shaking the ants loose.

“S–so many… more and more of them!”

Even though everyone on the ground was an ability user, the sight of that tsunami-like wave of ants froze them in terror.

And in the eyes of those yellow crazy ants—eyes glowing red—the two-legged beings on the ground were nothing more than soft, fragrant little cakes.

The two birds—one slender and one robust, one white and one gray—shook off the ants clinging to them and swept upward into the sky. They tore through the clouds, exchanged flight paths at the top, then dove back down. The clouds were flung behind them as they pierced straight into the swarm, blasting open two enormous voids in the dense mass of ants.

But the ability users on the ground were not nearly as lucky.

They could only stand their ground and use their powers, killing one or two ants at a time.

Someone as powerful as Li Qing could send a wave of black shadows up the bamboo and shred more than a dozen at once. Someone with a crippled ability like Du Weichen could only cling to Li Qing’s thigh and shout, “Here! There! Ahhh, they’re everywhere!”

“I told you not to come! Being ass*ulted would still be better than being torn to pieces by ants!”

Li Qing wrapped Du Weichen in a shroud of shadows and kicked him, sending him flying more than ten meters away.

Enveloped like a ball by the shadows, Du Weichen tumbled through the air. A portion of the yellow crazy ants instantly broke off to chase him. In an instant, their mandibles completely covered the outside of the shadow shell, antennae snapping and crackling against it. They gnawed at the barrier in a frenzy.

Du Weichen was terrified out of his wits. He jabbed at their antennae with his fingers, snapping off one signaling organ after another. Unfortunately, the number of ants did not diminish at all; instead, more and more swarmed toward him. He was soon wrapped layer upon layer in yellow crazy ants.

Zheng Xi panted heavily. After storing up power, he could crush dozens of ants at once, but the ant colony behaved like an inexhaustible, well-trained army. The speed at which they filled the gaps far outstripped the time he needed to gather energy.

Terror clogged everyone’s throats. They barely had time to breathe, much less scream. With each blink of an eye, the insect tide in their vision surged several times more violently than the second before.

These creatures were far stronger than any mutated animal the ability users had encountered recently—and their numbers were horrifying.

The ants’ overwhelming population was a natural advantage of their species, but what made the scalp crawl was that though their bodies had grown larger, their numbers had not been reduced in the slightest.

Wu Heng held his weapon tightly, his expression calm to the point of indifference, blood streaming down his face.

For the poppy, this was nothing short of paradise.

Vines shot up from the ground, transforming the entire visible bamboo forest into their sowing ground. The hard backs of the yellow crazy ants were split like eggshells, and the blood-fed vine shoots grew stronger, twisting and snapping the ants into two with sharp, tearing sounds.

Corpses of yellow crazy ants littered the ground. The poppy vines grew in dense swaths, swaying in the wind like a beautiful, dark green wheat field. Any ants that fell, or ability users gnawed beyond recognition, were devoured indiscriminately. The vines’ branches grew greener, even emitting a soft glow. Their leaves continued sprouting, growing longer, softer, and wilder with each passing moment.

Zheng Xi passed by a single vine, stepping backward continuously, his electric blade cutting relentlessly. The intense output of his ability made him dizzy, and he finally collapsed onto the ground.

A cold touch rolled up his neck.

Before he could react, a flash of white light streaked past, and Wu Heng severed the vine, pulling Zheng Xi upright.

“Careful.”

“Isn’t this—yours…”

“It’s shy around strangers.”

Wu Heng’s hand, the same one that held the poppy flower, was scorching hot; beneath the skin, it felt as if molten lava flowed.

The poppy vines’ growth was unprecedented, and it was obvious how immense their pleasure and satisfaction must be in this moment.

But as its container—and its master—Wu Heng felt slightly dizzy.

Dizzy proteins, he thought.

The yellow crazy ants surged in overwhelming numbers, stamping across the ground like iron hooves.

The bald man spat and cursed. Just as his ability cleared seven or eight ants in front of him, two more suddenly fell on his head. He raised his hands, but before he could activate his ability, one of the ants sliced through his arm.

Countless ants, attracted by the blood, immediately piled him layer upon layer into a fortress of ants.

Xie Chongyi turned, exhaled sharply, and slammed his palms onto the ground. The mound of yellow crazy ants exploded from beneath, limbs scattering. The ground was left completely empty of corpses.

There was no time to pause. Xie Chongyi unleashed a single strike that blew open the heads of over a hundred yellow crazy ants, rescuing several ability users from imminent danger.

“Why won’t they stop? Why are there more and more?”

Every time the two birds dove, another rain of ants fell from above. Even accounting for the output from the mutated vines and the high school boy’s abilities—easily a few thousand ants—they weren’t exactly holding back. Yet the ants’ numbers showed no sign of decreasing.

Zheng Xi swung his blade through the abdomen of one yellow crazy ant, then spun to shatter three more with a single strike of his palm. His glasses had long since been lost, and his clothes were soaked in blood. He roared, elegance and civility gone. “How long the hell is this going to last?!”

Everyone on this trip understood the level of danger. Since the apocalypse, threats had always lurked around humanity, and this time they were dealing directly with people from Jingzhou—so the difficulty of the situation was entirely predictable.

But the scariest thing wasn’t the danger itself. Danger was known; they had faced monsters before.

The scariest thing was the lack of hope.

Morale slowly began to sink. Fear that had no chance to emerge seized the moment, displaying itself boldly. Madness bred from terror and despair spread like Death itself issuing an invitation.

The ant swarm sensed the emotions of their opponents and the slight weakening of their attacks. Their antennae quivered in groups as they launched a faster, more furious ass*ult than before—from above the bamboo, from hidden shadows, sometimes singly, sometimes in packs, the whistling of their bodies slicing through the air.

An older man lost focus and was immediately knocked down. He screamed, “Mom!” as the mandibles close by exploded into a puddle of fragments.

Xie Chongyi sprinted to his side. Blood from his forehead dripped down his eyelashes onto the man’s pale, ashen face. “If you don’t want to die, get up.”

Trembling in fear, the man scrambled to his feet. Xie Chongyi obliterated the yellow crazy ants lunging at him. He squinted, noticing Wu Heng alone in the middle of the ant horde, swinging left and right. Wu Heng had said it himself: he did not know what fear was.

Wu Heng wielded his twin blades. He did not enjoy slaughter, yet the act of killing allowed him to empty his mind, to feel exhilaration, even to forget everything.

Clang, crack, hiss, groan—a symphony of carnage.

The expression on his face was vibrantly alive, a sight rare in a hundred years. The previous sense of faintness had been merely the body’s perception; now, his soul had taken control over his body. In this unrestrained mass*cre, the soul completely stripped the body of its authority.

The boy drove a blade into the mandibles of a yellow crazy ant. Pulling it out, he raised the edge and let the pink tip of his tongue lightly lick one side of the blade.

The surrounding vines continued to strangle relentlessly, yet he had his own moments of respite.

The sharp green blade sliced across his tongue.

Pink turned to green as two soft, tender vine shoots slurped back into his mouth.

In the eyes of the ant swarm, his action was pure provocation. Two-thirds of the swarm surged toward him.

Wu Heng lowered his casually indifferent expression. He kicked an ant beneath him, then thrust both hands to his sides. As he pulled back, the ground vines surged outward in a tidal wave.

A warm rain of blood poured down from above.

The smaller vine shoots that hadn’t yet latched twisted their bodies, quietly growing amidst the torrent of blood.

Leaves finally sprouted along the vines, each vine sending out its own branches. The branches divided again, the stems thick and robust, the foliage lush and green.

The numbers of the yellow crazy ants visibly decreased. Their attacks faltered. The ground was blanketed with blood and fragments of ant corpses, and the swarm began to show signs of retreat.

After the vines finished strangling the remaining yellow crazy ants tangled on the ground, the rest of the swarm had climbed back into the nests overhead.

The yellow-green mist in the air came from the guts of the yellow crazy ants splattering everywhere, while the dominant red haze was actually blood. In the murky atmosphere, Wu Heng shook his head, his body swaying inexplicably, and he fell backward to the ground.

Nearby, the poppy vine, swaying happily, and the gray bird circling above with bloodied feathers both lunged toward the boy at the same time.

Xie Chongyi, who had been standing beside Zheng Xi, vanished in an instant as well.

Wu Heng collapsed into Xie Chongyi’s arms, fingers gripping his sleeve, his expression dazed.

He hadn’t lost consciousness; his body was just weak, though his mind remained clear.

“…” Xie Chongyi looked into Wu Heng’s gray-green gleaming eyes and felt this trip might have been for nothing.

But there were other matters that required attention.

The boy held Wu Heng’s shoulders with one hand, while the other pinched his cheek, forcing him to open his mouth. His gaze locked on Wu Heng, unyielding. “Stick your tongue out, let me see.”

Wu Heng could be wildly violent at times, and at other times so obedient and harmless that even a kindergarten child would feel outmatched.

At this moment, he was in the latter state. To give Xie Chongyi a clearer view, he tilted his face back flatter, eyelids half-closed, soft and compliant.

“Ah—” He extended a tongue, long and slender like a snake’s.

<< _ >>