Chapter 5: F-ant-astic!

  Mitch didn’t know what to think. The orange glow emanating from the ceiling above gave an ominous downwards glow to his confused facial features.

  Mitch was currently looking at the tidal wave of car sized ants moving towards him at concerning speed. Yet even as he gave instructions to his leg muscles to move, they did not.

  Alright legs. What’s your problem? Mitch thought as he quickly snapped his perception sphere to focus on his horribly numb legs. The earlier high power stunt down the tunnel must’ve broken some weak links in Mitch’s partially completed genetic makeover.

  Mitch instantly saw the issue with his lower appendages. The heat generation from his dash down the tunnel had fried the nerves in his legs. The musculature and other graphene constructs were good as new, but all the supporting cells within… told a different story.

  With Mitch’s legs being stuck in a straightened position until his nerves had the chance to regenerate. He had to think of a different plan to deal with the wave of chitin in front of him.

  The wave is still about a hundred feet away, I have a dozen seconds to spare. Mitch tapped his chin then decided to touch his right leg with a finger. The quickly regrowing pink skin on Mitch’s right index finger immediately began burning on contact with the graphene on the surface of the leg.

  Uhhh, That heat is going to spread to the rest of my body within the next few seconds isn’t it? I have heat dissipators embedded in my skin but… I can already feel my stomach heating to an uncomfortable degree as the boiled blood comes circulating upwards.

  Must cool off faster. Need some water. Mitch thought quickly.

  It was at this point Mitch spotted a large pool of water in the center of the gargantuan cave chamber. The fuck is happening over there? The pool of water was below the ceiling embedded orange crystals which seemed to be condensating chunks of ice onto them. The confusing part was that at random intervals the ice would be flash melted into human sized globs of water with horribly loud sizzling noises accompanying the phenomenon. The globs of water would then fall and fill the large lake below.

  Lake is about two hundred feet away, ants are about thirty feet away now. My legs are nowhere near recovery… Handstand time.

  Mitch at that thought, tensed his core and pressed himself into a handstand. He tensed his triceps and launched himself fifty feet into the air arching horizontally towards the lake in the center of the cave chamber. He watched the wave of ants sore by below him with a wide smile spread across his lips.

  Did I overshoot it? Also my arms are feeling too warm all of a sudden as well. If I'd known I'd have access to this much energy generation I would’ve included active cooling systems in the spec… Mitch thought to himself, still watching the ground wiss by below him for a few seconds.

  Mitch was pleasantly surprised as his overhead press launch actually managed to land him in the lake. He was aiming for the center and landed in the far side of where he intended but it was good enough.

  Mitch’s legs sizzled as their temperature rapidly dropped. Ahh that’s nice. Is what I would say if I had any feeling left down there…

  Mitch watched the glowing surface of the lake fade up and away from him as he sank towards the deep abyss below. The silence was deafening. He didn’t see anything alive in this pool beyond sparse amebas and singular celled organisms.

  Approximately two dozen seconds later Mitch felt the cold stone of the lake floor press against his back. Even by this time Mitch hadn’t seen a single fish, or large plant. Just the sparse green algae dotting the lake floor.

  Finally some time to think… How am I here? What is the drug filled pulsating gas, and is it safe for me to keep consuming? What planet am I on? What is this pulsating gas made of? How is it so energy dense? I don’t know! What was that voice earlier? A family member? How do I stem this god forsaken energy flow before I accidentally kill myself via heat stroke? I don’t know. Is there civilization in the general vicinity? Maybe, I heard a single human sounding scream in the forest.

  Mitch kept spiraling, every burning question that came to mind landed him with the same response. ‘I don’t know!’

  What do I do now?.. Well, I want out of this damn ant hive. My bigger question is, should I keep eating the ants? I can taste significant amounts of pulse gas permeating the whole zone around me. I don’t have a choice but to be exposed to it. And if it helps my survival to keep eating the ants, I don’t have a choice in the matter.

  Alright my subpar information blind plan is: climb out of here. Kill or scare off the ants in the vicinity. Run off before something larger comes along to cook me alive. Find an exit to this cave system. Find some sort of civilization. Rely on this holoskin & translarto to assist me in stumbling through social interactions and hope I don’t get imprisoned or worse… Assuming I get that far, I’ll finally have access to some sort of information.

  Mitch’s anxiety was at near peak levels as he layed in the cold depths of the lake. He had no information to base a better plan off of. So the shitty goal oriented one will have to do for now. His mind eventually got too exhausted from all the circular planning that went nowhere and eventually allowed him to fall asleep.

  Mitch awoke feeling invigorated. And buried ten inches headfirst in a lakebed boulder. It seemed the magically drugged regenerative immune system had done a great job regrowing his cooked & smashed cells.

  Legs are functional. Head is no longer pulsating. My legs keep twitching. Probably how I ended up in this rock. How that didn’t wake me up is beyond me. I probably shouldn’t try dislodging my neck until I can get these leg spasms under control.

  Mitch slowly examined the nerve chain going down to his various lower body muscles. They all seemed well. From what he could tell the neurotransmitter homeostasis was still being stabilized between the old and new nerves. There wasn’t anything he could do about that without burning through his entire pulse gas reserve. His earlier fudging of hormones had cost him a concerning amount.

  Alright if I can find a way to modulate this pulse gas energy substitute mechanism it’ll kill two birds with one stone. Turn these leg spasms from a danger to my health to a mild nuisance; and fix my sudden combat ineptitude. If I try fighting like this I'm going to be launching myself around the cave chamber like a bouncy ball instead of actually killing ants effectively. Sure I can walk and jog around just fine; But, I could see sugar in my muscles taking priority over the pulse gas due to the low energy movements. However, In combat, my muscle memory kicks in and I’ll end up tripping everywhere due to the pulse gas fuel vastly over exaggerating any burst-like movements. And… if I do end up running out of biological sugar reserves… I’ll be completely uncontrollable. Better solve this fast.

  I’m pretty sure where I should be looking first is the fourth dimensional green neural net overlaid on my brain. I can sense two distinct overly glowing paths running through it. I’ll start with those.

  Mitch tried taking a deep breath to steady himself before diving deeper into his sixth sense. He proceeded to snort a facefull of ice cold lakewater into his sinuses. I’m a fucking dumbass.

  Mitch, after recovering from his cockup, condensed the focus of his sixth sense onto one of the two glowing paths running through his head. It flooded him with memories of his first days in the biology lab in highschool where he was introduced to how the school's own sonic tweezers worked to manipulate bacteria. A second memory bubbled to the surface as he looked farther down the traced metaphysical line. A memory of his first day in university college bio lab where they were experimenting with bacteria with differing types of flagellum and recording their top speed given food stimulus. The same lab session memory also covered white blood cells and how they move around using amoeboid movement instead of flagellum.

  Okay… I’m going to stop looking down that line. That is obviously whatever my microscopic slaps are. I knew I was thinking of manipulating cells utilizing their own Myosin motor proteins with a control system similar to sonic tweezers. I hadn’t expected my passing thought to solidify an ability built on top of a dozen disjunct memories… If I’d known that was going to happen I would have theorycrafted a bit more carefully… To be honest I hadn’t expected anything to come of my playful attempt against the ant. I wonder if I can modify the ability? I’ll worry about that later.

  Mitch shifted his focus. He moved onto the other glowing path through his brain. He was immediately hit with memories of his first highschool biology lectures on the process of cellular respiration. The first was a horribly boring lecture section on glycolysis. Next was an even more boring lecture on the Krebs Cycle. Finally was a cosmically mind meltingly disgustingly boring lecture on oxidative phosphorylation.

  Are you serious? This ability is built on top of my fuzzily remembered, fifty year old highschool lectures? Sure they’re much clearer after being assimilated into whatever this glowing line is, but that is definitely not optimal.

  Mitch focus. You can deal with your abilities being based on crusty old memories later. Now I just need to find how to modulate this damned thing.

  Mitch continued to scan the line. He was not surprised to find a plethora of other cellular respiration related memories, but he also saw a few memories of his most physically exhausting moments in life. Running his first marathon, a dozen cursed Eldoria combat memories, and a few overdone gym cardio sessions. Holy crap I found it! Mitch ended up finding one end of the glowing trace. He focused on the tip of the trace, a foreign sensation overcame him through his proprioception. There was a new microscopic muscle in the center of his skull.

  Mitch tried relaxing the muscle. Mitch’s face contorted into a look of disgust and discomfort from the completely alien feeling of moving a muscle inside his brain. As the odd metaphysical muscle fully relaxed Mitch immediately began feeling a burning sensation in his lungs. He felt the onset of hunger beginning to creep into his consciousness. His muscles felt deflated compared to how they felt just moments before.

  Too relaxed! Mitch quickly tensed the odd muscle to the fully taught position. The plethora of unpleasant physical sensations berating him quickly faded away.

  Can’t say I miss the feeling of suffocation. Alright. How about I let go of the tension slowly? I just want to not drown and have the alternative fuel power output to be roughly the same as my sugar based power output.

  Mitch pondered for a second and decided that his first instinct for figuring this out was probably his only option at the moment. I’ll just slowly relax it and do some high speed swimming to overwhelm my sugar usage and see how the feeling of the odd energy compares. I’ll eventually find the right brain muscle tension to get them roughly equal.

  Mitch spent the next hour slamming into random lakebed rocks at anywhere between two meters a second all the way to two hundred meters per second. He got a few brain contusions for his trouble but he eventually got enough practice with the mental muscle to keep it at a steady slightly tensed position.

  If I keep injuring myself like this I'm going to need to eat again soon. Not for the energy, but for the nutrients and materials needed to repair my non graphene constructed cells.

  Mitch took a few deep gulps of the cold cave water before beginning to make his way out of the lake. Compared to his earlier manic testing at higher energy levels his current swim was almost lethargic looking. Suffice to say even at his regular baseline Mitch was still easily able to fling himself six meters out of the water with his final breaststroke. He performed a tucked front flip and landed on his feet, then tumbled onto his ass due to his wet feet slipping out from under him on the smooth cave stone.

  Next time I'm just crawling out of the water. That was not worth my internal embarrassment. Good thing there’s only ants around to see me.

  Mitch looked around the cave chamber. There were around a dozen ants still in the cave, they all seemed small in size. Every ant before Mitch’s fumbled entrance were foraging moss and fungi around the lake.

  Mitch looked up to the nearest ant. It was purple in color just like all of its brethren. It studied him with its teacup sized compound eyes. The ant was merely two dozen feet away. The ant after farting a yellowish cloud of pheromones into the air charged Mitch.

  Mitch stood there with a deadpan look on his face as half of the two dozen ants charged him, while the other half scattered down different tunnels spreading pheromones everywhere.

  You know. On second consideration. What are my chances of being swarmed to death? I mean if all the ants are this weak I should have no issue. But I’ve got a gut feeling these gathering ants are not the cream of the crop combat wise…

  Mitch dashed towards the nearest ant and grabbed it by its human sized neck. He tensed his legs and launched himself and his new ant snack over the incoming swarm. The soft shale under his heels cracked and sent shards of rock in every direction. Mitch quickly picked out one tunnel that didn’t have an escaping pheromone ant going down it.

  Mitch began sprinting down the tunnel. His carbon heels clacked against the hard stone below him. The ant in his grasp had stopped moving after being accidentally slammed into multiple boulders during his escape.

  Mitch was not very relieved to sense ants in the cave walls of the tunnel he was sprinting down.

  I’m starting to get worried. Sure I thought based on the ant scale their colony would be near human city sized, but… I refuse to believe these barren caves have enough sustenance to support that many ants! Surely I'll get out of the colony soon? My mental stability at the current moment is not well enough to handle any more days of ants.

  Mitch, seeing as he’d be unable to find a good place to relax and chow down, started tearing into the dead ant in his grasp as he ran. The feeling of sheer euphoria that the pulsating gas his previous feeding sessions were saturated with was significantly duller as he tore into this ant.

  Am I building a tolerance? Is the ant no longer fresh just after a few minutes? Mitch rubbed his chin, spreading yellow goop across his lower face.

  Mitch continued dashing through ant infested tunnels and chambers at random. He would nab a few separated ants during his run throughs to keep his pulse gas supply topped off. It took around thirty minutes of aimless exploring at fifty miles an hour to find any notable events. He found himself buffeted with gusts of hot wind coming from one of the tunnels in the moss covered chamber he was currently running through.

  Heat in a cold barren cave system? What is that? Magma? More orange heat crystals? God forbid a heat controlling ant?

  Mitch’s curiosity begged him to figure out the source of the heat. Anything to be rid of the cycle of ant meat consumption. But Mitch’s paranoia was much stronger. Especially with the memory of the flaming ice bear mutant still fresh.

  Mitch ended up crawling through a tight gap in the stone as his sixth sense told him it opened up soon after constricting. This uncomfortable army crawling experience was much more enjoyable than figuring out whatever laid at the end of that heated larger tunnel Mitch told himself.

  But what if it was a way to escape? What if that tunnel is a straight shot up to the surface and it’s just hot surface air gusting downwards?

  Mitch froze, his pink skin covered in grey dust and brown mud as he was halfway through his ten foot army crawl.

  No, I'll just mark it as a possibility if I get too desperate. I’m uninjured, satiated and hydrated. Once any of those three change, then maybe I'll risk the hot tunnel.

  Mitch finished his crawl through the tight stone gap. He found himself looking into a massive cavern. Mitch was in awe as his eyes flitted around the chamber. The bulk of the chamber was filled with veiny yellow ant eggs. The chamber was saturated with orange light from fuzzy space heated crystals lining the high ceiling. There were a dozen ants tending to the eggs. The ants looked to be slightly larger versions of the worker ants he’d been tearing into today. The chamber was noticeably warmer than the ones he had been in before.

  Mitch squinted upwards, he thought he saw movement on the ceiling but maybe he was wrong. A few seconds later he managed to spot a tiny ant silhouette gliding across the rough ceiling on a thick line of orange mucus. By the point Mitch has managed to spot the vespa sized ant it was already almost directly above him.

  Uhhh. huhhh… I don’t know what I'm looking at. Mitch rubbed his chin once again looking up at the ant. He felt as if he shouldn’t tempt fate, but the ant was small enough that he was too curious and mentally unthreatened enough to see what would happen next if he didn’t bolt for it.

  Suffice to say, Mitch regretted his sloth immediately. The ant as it reached right above him stopped. Mitch had been expecting for the ant to drip mucus on his head or something but instead the slime surrounding the monster began glowing like the crystals on the ceiling. In one instant the ant was a hundred feet above him and the next the vespa sized ant was on his head. It’s horrifically large speed and inertia slammed him into the hard stone ground at three hundred miles an hour.

  Mitch impacted the stone ground with a loud crack as the ant scuttled off of his head no worse for wear. Mitch saw stars. His regret was palpable.

  Mitch heard a sizzling sound as the ant began sliding on its stomach around him spreading glowing orange slime in its wake. Within a second Mitch was encircled by a trail of ominously glowing orange.

  Mitch snapped to his senses and slammed his palms backwards into the stone below him. He attempted to fling himself out of the slimy circle. However, with his self limited strength he was too slow.

  With a clap of thunder Mitch was catapulted directly into the crystals in the ceiling above him. Mitch screamed out in agony as the orange crystals flared to skin obliterating temperatures as he touched them. Mitch pried himself off the crystals in an instant. His upper chest and face were now covered in patches of charred and burned skin. He fell to the ground in a daze.

  He landed in a pile of yellow goop as his carbon behind smashed through a dozen oversized ant eggs. Undercooked fetuses, gross protein slurry and larger pink and soft half baked ant abominations spilled out from his impact.

  Mitch quickly tensed his energy substitute muscle to give his hyper immune system the best chance to quickly repair the obvious brain damage he had accumulated so far. Mitch slowly stood from his daze. Careful to not make any sudden movements and launch himself into another stone surface.

  Mitch was now at the opposite side of the chamber. He began walking towards the nearest tunnel he could see in a hope to not need to engage with the explosive monster.

  Mitch was not so lucky. As he turned, he heard what sounded like a cacophony of fireworks going off and the orange vespa sized ant blurred in front of the tunnel he was making his way towards.

  I uhhh…. Uhhh. Am I going to die? Even my marginally more elastic brain and organs cannot take more impacts like that. I need some time to recover even now… If next time it launches me, if I can twist and land on my feet I should be able to handle the impact easily. Accomplishing such acrobatics is another problem entirely though.

  Mitch’s brain fog cleared. Mitch quickly relaxed the mental energy muscle just above his baseline. He needed a slight boost to get out of this situation.

  Mitch focused on the opponent in front of him. He watched the joints of the ant for any movement. At the slightest twitch he would dodge.

  The ant didn’t move a single limb, the pile of slime underneath it’s stationary form just instantaneously detonated in a horizontal cone like shape. The ant slid across the smooth stone chamber floor with zero friction at blurring speeds. It slid straight for Mitch’s legs as if a motorcycle sized hockey puck.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Mitch now prepared for this ant’s shenanigans just barely managed to leap over the blurring form. He landed and immediately began sprinting for the tunnel in front of him. A barbaric and simple plan began building in his mind.

  I can accomplish around one fully powered movement before needing to cool down. What is a way I can guarantee some sort of impact with a single movement?

  Mitch skidded to a stop a hundred feet into the tunnel. Hefted the largest loose bolder in the cave he could find. The hardest part of lifting the damned thing wasn’t the strain on his muscles but the balance needed to not fall over leveraging a multiple ton weight over his head.

  Mitch stood tensed and ready at the end of the tunnel with a four and a half foot diameter boulder resting in his palms. He tensed the energy muscle in his skull to the utmost degree. As he increased the tension in the muscle he felt a massive well of energy begin flooding his system. The muscular strain causing weight of the boulder vanished in an instant. The multiple tons of limestone felt as light as a feather quill.

  Mitch smiled as within the next second he spotted the expected orange streak of light engulfing the monstrous ant chasing after him. The explosive slime ant within the next second was a mere twenty feet away from him. It would only take another quarter of a second for the ant to take out Mitch’s knees.

  Mitch tensed with all of his might and pushed the boulder forwards. A blinding plasma as if a meteor entering the atmosphere flashed into existence covering both the boulder and his own body. The air heated due to the horrifically fast hypersonic movement.

  An earth rippling shockwave shot down the tunnel as the boulder of limestone detonated and blasted down the tunnel in a spray of superheated hypersonic shrapnel.

  Mitch instantly could no longer hear as the shockwave turned his eardrums to mush.

  The meager friction between Mitch’s dried blood covered feet and the smooth limestone below was not enough to hold him in place during the astronomical scale impact.

  Mitch was lifted off his feet and flung down the long curving tunnel like a pinball. He tumbled around the curve in the tunnel across the wall. It was at this moment Mitch blacked out as the repeated impacts to his skull turned him unconscious.

  If Mitch at this very moment were to look down the tunnel where he had pushed forward the boulder, he would see nothing but a dimly glowing crater twelve feet across. Which a few seconds later was filled with rubble as the cave entrance collapsed. The movement had around half the energy release characteristics of the Xk9399 fission grenades he had used not but the day before.

  Mitch awoke with the world's most painful headache. It felt as if someone had taken an entire sports store worth of icepicks directly to his skull. The second thing he noticed was his horrifically high fever. It was to a point where steam was rising from his nostrils even though he wasn’t breathing.

  Mitch quickly began checking himself over in his sixth sense. All of his internal organs not made of graphene smooth muscle like his liver, kidneys, lymph nodes & half of his nerves were in a variety of damaged states.

  Mitch pushed past the racking pain going through his body and tried feeling for his pulse gas reserves. He was relieved to feel that he was at around thirty percent. Not good but nothing catastrophic.

  Mitch wasn’t currently dying, and repairs were going smoothly. I have so many regrets about how that went. In hindsight, I'm pretty sure I could have used a hundredth of that power and still obliterated that ant with a single throw. I really need to find time to test my limits with the alternative energy use. Being unable to move for eight hours due to catastrophic damage from a single movement is not sustainable. I’ll assume the damage is worse this time around due to hitting solid bedrock instead of coming to a gradual stop on an ant corpse like last time.

  I’ll just count my blessings and be glad I'm alive. If I had stopped dead in my tracks when hitting the tunnel wall instead of rolling, I’m pretty sure I'd be dead at the moment.

  Mitch laid in the cold, dimly lit tunnel for hours. He thought of his family, his ex and how uncomfortable laying in a pool of blood and monster juice really was. Somehow the experience was a hundred times worse than in Eldoria. I’ve got a feeling it’s not due to the sensation but the inherent consequences of bleeding out as compared to respawning back in town.

  You know, thinking about it, I could technically get back to modifying my genes. All I'd need to do is manually create TALEN and CRISPR proteins using my microscopic tweezer ability. I know the structure of multiple relevant gene editing proteins like the back of my hand… However… I don’t have any reference material to work with. If I try fudging together a cooling system, I'm just going to end up as a cancerous blob.

  So if I want to fix my pitfalls I'm going to need some reference material. To fix my more catastrophic neurological shortcomings I'm going to need some sort of stasis chamber…

  Mitch with a weak wobbly arm slapped himself on the forehead. Why am I even thinking about this? I should be focusing on a plan for getting out of this forsaken cave. Or at the bare minimum reflecting on my very recent fuckup which resulted in my current state.

  After a few more hours of self reflective blood & juice pool soaking, Mitch’s body had finally managed to knit back together all of his internal organs.

  Now that I'm thinking about it, how did I bleed so much? My modified platelets and graphene skin graft should have prevented such a thing. It was at this point the nerves in his mouth had come back from numbness and Mitch immediately tasted a large helping of blood coating his mouth, throat and sinuses. He gagged.

  Turns out, if you turn your lungs into mush they don’t like staying put.

  Mitch finally rose from the ground. His face held a look of deep determination. If anyone else were to see him, they would run in fear. The wet red and yellow blood marbling across his regenerating skin made him look more ghoul than human.

  He grabbed one of the detached pulse gas dense ant legs laying near him, an attempt to refill his reserves. How is this thing still leaking blood?

  Mitch shook his head as he stood fully, this was no time to be asking such questions. It was time to get out of this ant hill or die trying.

  They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. But, what stared down the dim orange tunnel were no windows, they were weapons.

  Mitch’s scleras were covered in a fractal of emissive sickly green veins. Mitch found himself tearing into an ant leg for the tenth time today…

  Mitch wandered the caverns, his ghoulish appearance was even more prominent. He was covered head to toe in shades of drying blood. His gate was predatory, his face scrunched, his gaze filled with annoyance.

  Mitch continued to wander the halls thinking of all the hundreds of ways he was going to tear the next ant he sees into pieces.

  Such a familiar scene was beginning to force Mitch back into his Eldoria mental patterns.

  His eyes flitted across the cave ceilings and walls, a habit born of a lifetime of virtual bloodshed. A habit that was wholly useless to Mitch in this tight cave fully covered by his perception sphere. He continued with eye motions on the grounds of it being paranoia soothing.

  The grey and brown limestone surroundings turned into a mental blur as the combat ready walk turned into a sullen trudge down the concerningly barren, empty and dark tunnel system. Even after what felt like a mile of walking there wasn’t a single offshoot or chamber to explore.

  Mitch walked for so long, his regenerating skin had begun to coalesce and evolve his complexion from ghoulish to newborn baby. Chunks of char and old skin had continuously sloughed off his form cleaning off the blood at least.

  Mitch considered using his holoskin belt as a light. But, the slight moral boost was not worth the chance of drawing any unwanted attention.

  This may be horrifically optimistic, but I've been walking for a while now without a single ant being present in the cave or surrounding walls…

  The millions of nerve cells in Mitch’s skin finally stopped going haywire from the rapid regeneration. And Mitch realised something very concerning.

  The cave air is scorching! Now that I'm thinking about it the cavern exit I took was pointed in the same direction as that heated cave…

  Mitch began mentally praying as he continued his march forwards. He prayed for the surface or a mundane magma pit. But knowing his own luck, there’d be a dragon at the end of this tunnel.

  Mitch spotted a dim orange glow around the next cave curve. As he made the right turn he found himself blasted with a gust of superheated air causing him to snap his eyes shut to avoid them drying out.

  I mean what are the chances that something lives down her…

  Mitch opened his eyes. What he saw was a massive black obsidian chamber. It was at least three hundred meters in diameter, and rose just as far in height. The second most concerning portion was the violently bubbling magma covering the inner thirty percent of the chamber floor. The most concerning portion was the orange… glowing… titanic… ant head… poking out of the magma. It moved. The head was pointed directly at Mitch.

  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me! God, I'm not praying again for at least a year as you clearly have a hard on for screwing me! I’d take a dragon over another fucking ant!

  Panic planning time. Ant large. Ant size of semi-truck. It’s too hot here. Find exit. Run like lightning. I ain’t fighting this thing in its magma death pool.

  Mitch spotted only one other exit in the black shiny chamber. A massive tunnel at least ten feet across which looked to go on forwards for a while.

  Mitch heard a loud rumbling and saw the glowing ant stand up from its magma bath. It was confidently strutting in his direction.

  Mitch stuck out his tongue in focus. Crouched down. Aimed his upper body towards the cave exit. Ever so slightly tensed his mental energy muscle to the two times baseline mark. And he leapt for it.

  Mitch gleefully watched the massive ant sore under him as it seemed like his jump was nearly perfect. He could tell that the trajectory was going to land him just a mere five meters away from the cave exit.

  But… At the apex of his jump, Mitch noticed the ant’s head tracking him through the air. The ant in a jerky motion shoved its odd horn-like head protrusions into the magma pool and flicked its neck upwards towards Mitch.

  Mitch watched in horror as a shotgun of high speed magma droplets soared towards him. He twisted and turned around his center mass as well as he could, and… he managed to dodge every droplet…

  Uh what? I swear a few of those hit me, but I don’t feel any pain.

  Mitch smiled then looked away from the ant, he mentally prepared himself for landing. It was at this point Mitch spotted a gigantic curtain of magma droplets in front of him. They were frozen in the air as if they were a photo of rainfall in motion.

  Small intricate runes began to snap into reality on the droplets of magma. As the runes appeared fully, the droplets began to glow like miniature suns.

  An explosion larger than anything Mitch had managed to produce himself rippled through the chamber. More importantly, the heated shockwave slammed into Mitch. It catapulted him with triple the velocity of his original jump, but now in the opposite direction. He tumbled through the air like a ragdoll as the pressure wave had shredded his eardrums and sense of direction.

  For the second time today, I think I'm going to die. How do I even fight that? That was like an explosive grapeshot cannon blast coming from a damned ant.

  Once again, Mitch’s skin had taken a beating. His whole frontside was nothing but a layer of black char, with exception of his eyeballs. He had managed to flinch them closed just in time.

  Mitch cracked his eyes open to see the ant preparing another volley of magma grapeshot.

  Uhhh! Time to hoof it! Fuck the consequences! One more of those shots am i’m dead anyways.

  Mitch tensed his energy alternative muscle to its half flexed position. He dropped onto his hands and toes into a spider crawl. He flexed his forearms and shattered the smooth volcanic glass beneath both of his hands with satisfying cracks. He pushed with his legs and pulled with his arms.

  Mitch blurred across the cavern floor with a sonic crack echoing behind him. As he made his second step a hundred meters away from where he started, Mitch felt vibrations in the stone from the second magma volley detonating far behind him.

  Mitch glanced at the ant, it hadn’t even seen him move yet. Its weird head movements combined with the shrapnel kicked up by the droplet detonations gave Mitch a clean escape.

  Realising he had time and how overheated he was, Mitch tamped down his energy alternative muscle to two times baseline. He maintained his earlier momentum from the explosive crawl start and kept himself horizontally aloft until he was fifty feet into the cavern exit.

  Cold air blasted against Mitch as he stood up from his crawl. It felt heavenly against his back, as he couldn’t feel any of the skin on his frontside.

  Can’t stop. Must keep running. I can feel it in my bones that ant is going to start following me for some god forsaken reason.

  Proven to be right. Mitch heard rumbling and crackling as the ant’s sharp legs shattered the obsidian beneath its feet.

  Mitch looked at his pulse gas reserves and saw they were down to a measly twelve percent.

  Jesus Christ! Regeneration is expensive! If the chase with this ant goes on any longer than ten minutes of sprinting I'm going to run out of energy. And that’s only two times the baseline!

  Spotting a rocky dark crevice that would easily hide him if the ant were to rush by, Mitch ran for it hoping to hide from the ant.

  Wait hold on, who says the ant doesn’t have a perception sphere like I do? I might just be cornering myself.

  Mitch noticed a substantial increase in the orange light intensity around him. Mitch froze then looked up and realised the ant was right above him. Terror flooded through his veins. But as he stared down the beast an icy calm forced its way through his brain.

  Alright plan c. I’m killing this overgrown bug and eating ant legs for the eleventh time today! If I run down the tunnel I'm going to get scatter shot by magma and hiding is not going to work. I can feel the heat radiating off its exoskeleton, it is also giving off visible black body radiation everywhere except for its overly huge eyes. I bet I could crawl into those sockets if I could pop one of its eyes.

  Mitch immersed himself in the delusion that this was a fight in Eldoria and not a fight for his life. Distractions such as death would do nothing for him at this point. This ant needed to die.

  Mitch dashed forward and grabbed a nearby chunk of sharp obsidian.

  The ant plunged its glowing orange horns into the ground and flung its head upwards. Droplets of magma flew off the horns. However much less than the head flick in the pre melted magma earlier. Mitch let his weight fall backwards and performed a knee slide under the magma droplets. The charred skin on his knees acting almost like a carbon lubricant against the smooth obsidian.

  Mitch tensed his core and jumped to his feet. He immediately twisted downwards, gripping the obsidian shard tightly. He put fifteen percent alternative power through his body and went through with the throwing motion.

  The fragile obsidian rock shattered as it left his hand. The cloud of supersonic obsidian shards thumped into the ant’s left eye. The ant’s head raised from the pain, it screeched out, and began trying to guard its damaged eye with a foreleg. The screech sounded more human than it had any right to.

  Mitch, seeing the ant distracted, kicked himself up the cave wall. He held onto the wall with a single hand cracking the obsidian into a custom handhold. Mitch planted his feet and tensed his legs. He felt the obsidian crack and shatter beneath his feet as he rocketed horizontally. He barely managed to slip over the forelimb and into the goo and mush filled eye socket.

  Mitch smiled. It was a deranged smile. A smile that would haunt generations to come. A smile of a soon to be multiverse renowned killerl.

  Mitch quickly punched two hard handholds above himself in the eye socket keratin. He held on tight as at this point the ant was thrashing its head around violently. Mitch hung his weight by his hands then explosively leveraged himself forwards and kicked out with both legs. He went at the back of the eye at fifteen percent power. All it took was two good kicks to break through the chitin behind the ant’s eye. Mitch crawled into the ant’s brain.

  Mitch had now evolved from a human to an ant brain parasite. He closed his eyes and immersed himself in the oddly smelless cranial fluid and blood mixture within. Mitch considered eating the brain first but knowing his past experience he needed some pulse gas first. In turn, he began drinking the cranial fluid and ant blood like a water starved man.

  After getting a poultry amount of pulse gas from the arthropod blood. Mitch began tearing into the Ant’s brain. He ripped the pink soft jelly apart like a steroid using groundhog digging through soft soil. Once Mitch sensed that the Ant had stopped moving, he swam his way out of the mush filled skull. He came out the way he went in. He hadn't eaten a single piece of brain so far, there just wasn't enough pulse gas in the brain fluids.

  Mitch, now royally boiled and charred, crawled out of the massive ant corpse’s eye like a spider wasp larvae being spawned from their egg. A waterfall of yellow blood poured from the wound along with thick brain fluid.

  Now that I can see this ant’s internals after the sixth sense noise disappeared. It doesn’t look anything like an ant on the inside. It has a heart, cranial fluid, large brain, full digestive tract, some weird set of twelve lungs? I mean the other ants looked weird but I hadn’t actually stopped to actually focus on it…

  Anyways, disgusting chow time. I shall speak of these deeds with no one once I get out of here.

  Mitch cracked open the back of the ant and dove into its chest cavity. He ate it from the inside out, he had no need to breathe and making holes in the ant chitin was good enough to relieve himself of excrements.

  Mitch stood there basking in the filth. He thought his nose had been desensitized to the smell of ant innards hours ago. But there was just so damn much. Mitch’s blinding, drug fueled hunger had masked the smell fully at the start but the longer he scraped at the innards of the exoskeleton the worse it began to smell. Although it might just be the multiple piles of turds outside of the ant.

  Mitch had managed to consume around eighty percent of the ant body and his pulse gas reserves had hit some sort of soft cap. He ate more ant meat but the gas would just quickly radiate out from his body into the air instead of being stored in his cells.

  Hrmm, seems like this is the best I can prepare. Time to get started on the brain. I might need to come back for a bit more body meat if the brain is too potent.

  Mitch emerged from a new hole in the back of the truck sized ant corpse. The view was alien and disturbing almost as if a parasitic worm bursting from a host. Strings of flesh and internal tendons stuck to his outer form. The flesh tore and snapped with wet pops as he yanked himself forwards.

  My suspension of reality is starting to break down. The pungent smells of shit and blood are really getting on my nerves. My self serving delusion that this is a vr game instead of reality can’t handle many more wet gory experiences before I snap. Mitch managed to postulate surprisingly coherently despite the circumstances.

  Mitch crawled into the eye socket of the massive ant for the second time this evening. He began with the closest bloody yellow chunk of ant brain. His stomach told him that this shit was too disgusting to even consider eating. However, the secondary green neural net was urging him to consume the vile meat. Mitch felt helpless to stop himself. The impulse was so strong. It was as if he was staring at an open bottle of daniels, one year sober.

  I need it!

  Mitch shoved the jelly like meat into his mouth. The taste was vile, the texture was anything but satisfying… However, pure pleasure shot into his brain as the quantum threads were torn from the ant neurons in his guts.

  He witnessed the secondary neural network squirm and spawn more nodes. It grew ever so slightly denser in all areas with every bite. The oddest part was that the neural network would take the threads, split them in half, and inject one portion into Mitch’s biological neurons instead. It was like watching wet hair stick to a smooth surface as the quantum threads stuck to Mitch’s neurons. Although that wasn’t an accurate metaphor, it was as if the threads when injected vanished in their entirety. No new neurons were born of the substance intake, Mitch couldn’t see any new developments in any of the affected cells and frankly he did not care at the moment.

  The sheer number of endorphins flooding his brain from the secondary neural network gave him a very short attention span to say the least.

  After ten minutes of drug-filled vile work Mitch had finally finished eating the ant brain. He needed to take frequent pauses as when the threads integrated into his own brain he’d get a sudden sense of extreme vertigo.

  Mitch crawled his way out of the empty skull, he felt surprisingly good. His skin was back to the newborn baby stage after a few hours of eating. Mitch also noticed his perception sphere was significantly bigger than before, it went from twelve feet to a whopping fourteen! I’d call that f-ant-astic! Ha!

  That ant, based on its pulse gas reserves and threads was at the same level as that bear. The bear brain got me twelve feet and yet the ant only got me two… Must’ve gotten ten as a baseline then the bear gave me two on top of that? Sure, let's go with that.

  Mitch looked down the new, dark, empty tunnel he needed to walk down. Once again covered head to toe in ant blood and guts. I’m going to come back here with the galaxy’s largest magnifying glass and burn this ant colony to ash. If I get an ear infection from alien ant blood I'm not going to be a happy camper.

  Mitch had jogged down the one large tunnel for around ten minutes. To his surprise and relief there were multiple branching paths for him to explore instead of the horrific monotony of a straight tunnel. Mitch explored a new much less ant dense cave system than before. Sure he had to kill off a few worker ants here and there but there wasn't a single notable incident for hours of exploration.

  So to recap, what I've found so far has been, grey rock caves, black rock caves, worker ants, moss, water ponds, purple cave weeds and more damn ants! How are these ants surviving down here? Eating rocks and weeds? If so, there shouldn’t be this many of them!

  Mitch continued to grumble to himself for another hour as he tore into ants and kept running through tunnels with no daylight in sight. The only source of light he ever got was a rare ceiling mounted fuzzy magic crystal. So far he had seen three different colors of them, orange, violet and magenta. The magenta one gave him bouts of dizziness as he stood in the cavern below it,

  so he evacuated from that one extremely quickly.

  There was one interesting landmark though. In one of the caves filled with violet crystals a lightning surrounded warp in space was writhing around like a living creature. Mitch had stared at it for far too long, but his cautiousness prevented him from getting too close. But he swore at random intervals the view of a metallic room with a human like figure hunched over something would appear in the distortion. The room seemed awfully bright as well.

  Mitch ended up walking away from the distortion chamber filled with questions. He didn't dare walk too close. He continued on his way looking for a way to the surface.

  For all I know that distortion is so unstable the moment I get too close I'll get spaghettified.

  Mitch at this point had managed to get comfortable with the one and a half times energy baseline he was using. He could now accurately feel what movements would trigger the alternative energy instead of his organic sugar reserves.

  After another thirty minutes of throwing rocks at ants, jogging through caves and grinding moss under his heels out of spite… Something interesting happened.

  The earth shook. It did not stop. The vibrations slowly began to resonate. From the noise a man’s voice.

  “Mitch Korrigan, this is force herold Hugo Smedberg. Reaper base defender for the Archid system. Colonel of the Emperor's Legion. Under the jurisdiction of the empire you will remain where you are and wait for rescue and arrest. Do not make me repeat myself!”

  “I’m locking in on your location now. The empire requires your service.”

  Mitch’s brain was short circuiting. The empire is after me still. They sent someone who can cause large scale earthquakes… But there was one word that stood out to Mitch the most. A word that he had dreaded for his entire life. A word that had consumed his father: “service”. I will not be tossed into some war front-line! I deserve to live the life I want!

  Emotional platitudes aren’t going to get me anywhere. I need a plan. I don’t know how much time I have. What can I even possibly do?

  I don’t have time to search for a way to the surface… I really only have one option. Try to dive through the space distortion. Hah, fuck my life.

  Mitch began sprinting full tilt at four times baseline towards the distortion cavern. He had kept a thorough mental map of the cave system as he was sure he’d be running for his life again. He had expected an ant but humans are just as scary.

  Left, right, forewards, two o’ clock, eleven o’ clock, sharp right, sharp left, wide u turn through this tunnel, sharp right. There it is!

  Mitch heard Hugo’s voice rumble through the cave system once again, “Mitch Korrigan, your actions here will be considered evading arrest! It’s only a matter of time before I track you down. Actually… I see you!”

  A split second afterwards Mitch began hearing ten times louder rumbling from above.

  Mitch stared at the pulsating fractal of violet energy which was the distortion. It was at least fifteen feet across. The good thing was Mitch didn’t feel any sense of vertigo standing just a mere twenty feet away from it’s center.

  I just need to wait for it to coalesce… when I was watching it earlier It would do it every minute or so.

  Mitch stared intently at the distortion center waiting for the instant it flickered into a portal. The rumbling above him began to get uncomfortably loud. Mitch could feel himself accumulate hearing damage by the second.

  There!

  A seven foot tall, meat mountain of a form slammed into the cave floor at blurring speed. Shockwaves cascaded around the chamber, jostling Mitch violently. The stone below Mitch’s feet had risen from the astronomical impact Hugo had with the ground. The stone catapulted him directly through the unstable portal.

  Mitch heard a faint and gruff, “What the fuck?!” behind from the other side as the strongest feelings of nausea and vertigo overtook his body.

  He found himself tumbling in a heap with what looked to be an unconscious grey skinned elf wearing some sort of half constructed organic looking metal suit. There were also shiny black scales lining the elf's neck and torso poking out underneath the armor. To top it off the elf’s twitching right arm was bobbing up and down into and out of the metal floor as if it were a dense fluid.

  Mitch looked around the room and the distortion was nowhere to be found. The chamber looked to be nearly the same make and design as the empire base Mitch found himself in days earlier.

  Looking back down at the elf looking… male? Mitch noticed it’s right eye twitch. He immediately reached for his holoskin, he pressed confirm on the device the instant the elf’s eyes began to open.