"Thirty-two. It has been days, and the count remains exactly thirty-two."
Chelich ripped a mouthful of charred meat from the roasted arm of a low-ranking soldier drone. She chewed slowly, her eyes tracking across the arched ceiling of the birthing chamber, silently calculating the catastrophic deficit.
Suspended in the gloom at the absolute highest point of the nest hung thirty-two massive, translucent eggs. They dangled in a perfect row. The amniotic fluid sloshing inside them practically hummed with sheer aura density. Any practitioner stepping through the doorway would have immediately staggered under the suffocating pressure radiating from the ceiling. The nascent lives incubating inside those sacs harbored roughly seventy to eighty percent of a Royal Guard's total combat capacity. Thirty-two of them.
They had not been manufactured cheaply.
The queen lay crumpled at the far end of the cavernous room. Her massive, insectoid chest hitched and shuddered. She pulled air through her spiracles in wet, ragged gasps, mechanically sustaining a failing biological system purely out of instinct. The internal organs responsible for churning out the chimera ant army had been redlined for weeks, pushed vastly beyond any logical physical limitation. Her nutritional intake had plummeted far beneath the baseline threshold required for basic cellular maintenance. She was absorbing significantly less than she required to continuously produce. The agonizing arithmetic of a factory running at maximum output while completely starved of raw materials.
Chelich fully understood the biology. She had deliberately refused to alter the production schedule.
She tossed the half-eaten bone aside, crossing the stone floor to stand directly over the dying queen. "Useless," Chelich spat. "Your singular function is production, and you cannot even manage that."
The queen weakly lifted her massive head.
One trembling foreleg reached upward, stretching blindly into the empty air between them. It was a desperate, agonizing gesture—a final appeal or a pathetic attempt at connection. Her mandibles clicked, struggling to form a sound.
Chelich slammed her boot directly down onto the queen's swollen lower abdomen.
The pressurized organs inside the queen's body ruptured. A sickening, wet tear echoed through the cavern as her internal structure collapsed and spilled out across the stone floor.
The queen's single, clouded eye rolled back, locking onto Chelich's massive, unmoving silhouette.
"Meruem," she wheezed.
It was not a sound her anatomy was designed to produce. A perfect, cleanly articulated human word, forced through an insectoid throat completely unequipped for the task. It carried the heavy, unmistakable finality of a creature delivering its dying breath.
Chelich froze completely.
She turned her head.
A massive, jagged hole gaped in the chamber wall. It had not been there a second ago. A figure stood perfectly silhouetted in the breach, backlit by the dim light of the corridor. He stared at her. His face held the cold, absolute detachment of a predator that had already run the numbers and finalized the verdict.
How had he breached the chamber without generating a single decibel of sound? How had he displaced absolutely zero aura?
During the long months gestating inside the nest, Chelich had constantly assured herself she fully understood her brother's psychology. He was cold-blooded. Utterly purpose-driven. He casually eradicated inconveniences the exact millisecond they ceased to be useful. She had meticulously managed her own behavior to ensure she remained firmly on the right side of his brutal calculus.
Staring into his dark, unblinking eyes, she instantly realized the calculation was already over.
"Answer me," Meruem demanded.
Chelich parted her lips, desperately scrambling to formulate a strategic response.
"Chelich," he pressed, "or Tserriednich?"
Meruem did not wait for the words. He had already pulled the answer directly from the erratic electromagnetic flutter of her hesitation. The microscopic pause provided all the necessary data. He stared at her for one more agonizing second, solidifying the assessment. "I understand."
"Do not assume—" she snapped.
He was already behind her.
Chelich blinked, glancing down at her chest. She stared at the massive, gaping void where her sternum and internal organs used to be. A profound, icy shock rippled through her nervous system—the terrifying realization that she had grasped the situation a fraction of a second too late to survive it.
The Ant King stood directly behind her back, her crushed heart dripping fluid from his fingertips.
As her brain starved of oxygen, a final, bitter thought flickered through her fading consciousness. She genuinely believed she had been a vastly superior strategist than this pathetic conclusion suggested. The variables had been completely manageable. The queen's brutal production schedule was definitely pushing the threshold, but she could have easily corrected the deficit. She was building toward a grand design, and the pieces simply hadn't fallen into place yet.
Her knees buckled.
Her heavy body slammed into the stone floor, the thick purple blood pooling out around her corpse before she even finished falling.
Netero stepped through the shattered wall right behind Meruem.
The old man swept his gaze across the chamber. He registered the fresh corpse bleeding out on the stone, tracked the Ant King's rigid posture, and finally stared up at the thirty-two massive eggs hanging from the ceiling. He had been forcefully dragged along at the King's new travel velocity, a terrifying category of movement that required extreme physical recalibration upon stopping.
"You have entirely converted to light-speed traversal," Netero noted, his voice carrying the dry, analytical tone of a martial artist observing an impossible technique. "You hauled a passenger at that velocity, and simultaneously read the cognitive data directly from the electromagnetic patterns inside her brain. All within the time it took her to formulate the first syllable of a lie."
Meruem had already dismissed the corpse on the floor.
He stepped carefully across the chamber. He moved with extreme, deliberate caution, actively avoiding the slick puddles and ruptured organs scattered across the stone between him and the dying queen.
He slowly sank to his knees beside her massive head.
"Mother," Meruem said softly. "I apologize for being late."
The queen's trembling foreleg lifted, gently pressing against the side of his face. The rigid, chitinous anatomy of the limb was entirely unsuited for comfort, yet she made the gesture anyway. Her remaining eye rapidly lost focus, the pupil blowing wide as the final biological shutdown commenced.
She clicked her mandibles, whispering his name.
She whispered it a second time.
The syllables carried the profound, heavy relief of someone finally setting down an unbearable weight they had carried for far too long.
Meruem leaned into the cold, rigid touch, refusing to pull away.
"Lataiagai," he murmured into the quiet chamber. "That will be your name. It means the earth that nurtures everything."
Her ragged breathing hitched, continuing for three more shallow cycles. He remained perfectly still, his eyes locked onto hers.
When the rattling breaths finally ceased, he gently grasped her heavy foreleg and lowered it to the stone floor.
He stood up, turning his attention to the thirty-two massive eggs hanging in the gloom.
"Pitou, Shaiapouf, Youpi," he said, speaking softly into the ambient electromagnetic currents vibrating around his body. "Take care of her."
Three distinct, complex signal patterns instantly flared back from the ambient field. The digital ghosts of his Royal Guards had been passively tracking his coordinates ever since their uploads. Yes. Understood. No problem.
Dense, blinding light flooded Meruem's palms. He meticulously shaped the raw energy, mapping it to the exact upload sequence he had learned from Pe and executed on Pitou. He pressed the light directly into the queen's massive skull. The lingering traces of her consciousness, the accumulated weight of her long, brutal existence, sheared cleanly away from her failing biology. The data streamed directly into the glowing field in his hands, launching upward into the sprawling global network. The three waiting signals caught her instantly.
He dropped his hands, staring down at his open palms.
They were slick with fresh blood.
It did not belong to Chelich. It was his own. He had been intimately aware of the biological rot spreading through his system since the moment he grabbed Neferpitou's hand on the battlefield. He had knowingly permitted the highly infectious, targeted biological agent to cross the threshold into his own bloodstream simply because he deemed the final physical contact worth the lethal consequence. His immense biological structure had been violently overcompensating for days, forcefully burning through its own cellular foundation to maintain his combat functionality.
"You need to conserve whatever reserves you have left," Netero warned, his voice tight. He wasn't being polite; he was offering a genuine, critical assessment. "If you harbor any intention of surviving long enough to initiate your own digital transfer, you must stop hemorrhaging your life force on parlor tricks."
Meruem kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Thirty-two nascent lives. Each one incubating with near-Royal-Guard capabilities. Each one forged from months of the queen's agonizing labor. If left to hatch, thirty-two apocalyptic biological weapons would carve a bloody path through the world, operating purely on mindless instinct, devoid of any reason to behave differently than the millions of mindless drones that preceded them.
Meruem slammed his palms together.
The blinding light erupted from his flesh, immediately fracturing into thirty-two laser-precise beams. Each beam struck an egg flawlessly. The contact lasted barely a millisecond. The nascent lives inside the sacs reacted exactly like Neferpitou and the queen. Their raw, unformed consciousnesses sheared cleanly away from their developing physical vessels, instantly converting into pure digital data. Thirty-two new, complex configurations flooded into the global electromagnetic field simultaneously.
The massive, glowing eggs instantly dimmed into hollow, rotting husks.
The biological blowback hit Meruem immediately. His heavily compromised anatomy, desperately managing its own total collapse for weeks, finally fractured under the massive energy output. Blood violently ruptured from the pores across his arms, chest, and torso. The thick, dark fluid reeked of a biological system pushed entirely past its breaking point.
Meruem stood perfectly straight, refusing to stagger.
Netero watched the blood pool around the King's bare feet.
"Alright," Meruem said, wiping a smear of dark fluid from his chin. "I have kept you waiting."
"Are you even capable of—"
"A promise is a promise." Meruem's voice remained absolute. It lacked the effortless vitality of peak physical condition, but it carried the terrifying, unshakable resolve of an entity that had completely removed their physical health from the equation. "You successfully located the queen. I explicitly stated I would fight you in exchange for that service. I do not withdraw from transactions I have authorized."
Meruem slowly closed his eyes.
He reached deep into his core, violently tapping into the absolute final reserves of his life force. The finite, non-negotiable quantity of raw energy every biological creature possesses just prior to death. He forcefully drafted the energy upward with the total, singular intent of a king deciding that this specific engagement was entirely worth the ultimate cost. The ragged, bleeding wounds across his torso rapidly fused shut. The severe internal hemorrhaging slowed to a crawl. His rapidly collapsing biology forcibly stabilized, knitting itself back together into a functional, lethal weapon.
His suffocating aura exploded outward, returning instantly to the terrifying, god-like density he possessed the exact second he was born.
Netero's jaw tightened. The old man had spent an entire century mastering the precise mathematics of mortal combat, and the raw variables currently radiating from the Ant King produced a wildly unfavorable calculation.
"Do not look at me like that," Meruem demanded. He extended one hand lazily toward the dim ceiling, an open invitation. "I can comfortably slaughter you ten times over before I even begin to feel fatigued. At least."
A dark, fleeting ghost of a smile touched the King's lips.
Netero violently clapped his palms together.
The 100-Type Guanyin Bodhisattva erupted into existence behind his back. It was not the identical, muscle-memory construct he had manifested back in the city before his deep conversations regarding the delicate balance of yin and yang, the true composition of natural energy, and the ultimate price of shattering mortal thresholds. This was the evolved iteration. Netero channeled exactly nine percent of his newly expanded, massive internal reservoir directly through the seventh category. A half-century of peerless Enhancement perfectly synchronized with the raw natural system. The towering golden Bodhisattva that materialized boasted three thousand burning eyes and three thousand sweeping arms. It stared down at the Ant King, radiating the immense, crushing patience of a weapon forged over a century by a man entirely dedicated to the craft of violence.
Meruem stared up at the impossible golden structure.
A microscopic shift registered around the corners of his eyes. It was not surprise—surprise implied he had incorrectly calculated a variable he deemed important. Rather, it was the deep, resonant satisfaction of confirming his hypothesis that humanity still harbored something genuinely worth discovering.
"Excellent," Meruem murmured, dropping into a low stance. "A little more entertainment before the end."
Meruem launched himself forward.