The nest wasn’t far. Vajra turned around, and within minutes he was back at the stretch of rubble where the beetles had first emerged.
The anger had already settled by the time he arrived. He sent the drone up first — standard caution — and swept the surrounding ten kilometres before committing to ground operations. Nothing unusual in range.
Weapons checked. He climbed out and walked to the emergence point.
The opening was a cave mouth buried among collapsed stone and construction debris. The vibration scanner’s echolocation built a rough picture of the interior: not deep, but wide — nearly half a sports ground in area, the ground beneath this entire section essentially hollow.
He started clearing the entrance. At eight-bull strength, shifting large stone blocks was several seconds of effort rather than a genuine obstacle. Within a few minutes he had enough of the opening exposed that the daylight angle let him see inside.
Movement. Several large black shapes in the interior shadows.
“Can’t fight in there comfortably.”
He thought for a moment, then went back to Vajra and connected the exhaust pipe to the fire truck’s water hose, pointing the open end toward the cave mouth. He blocked half the air intake, set the throttle to hold the engine at a sustained incomplete combustion cycle, and stepped back.
Black smoke began billowing from the hose end into the cave opening.
He stood at the entrance and fanned it inward.
The beetles came out one by one, each one meeting the warhammer as it emerged. Clean, methodical, unremarkable.
Then the last one appeared.
It was slow. Its movements had the careful deliberation of something managing serious damage rather than simply being torpid by nature. The body was three times the size of any of the others. And one side of its head capsule was missing — not worn or degraded, but absent in the way that suggested a high-energy impact had removed it. The Activity radiation coming off the creature was erratic, unstable in a way he recognised.
Injured. Badly.
Was this one hit by the garrison’s explosives? Still not healed?
He thought about it for exactly as long as it took to raise the warhammer.
Doesn’t matter. I came to finish this.
The blow landed on the damaged head. The already-compromised structure gave way completely. Whatever had been holding the creature’s Activity together collapsed with it.
He loaded the carcass and checked the sky. Evening, moving toward dark. The bombed road section ahead hadn’t been filled — that work would have to wait for daylight. He was camping here tonight.
Safe enough. The beetle colony was gone. Within an active colony’s range, competing groups and strong individuals generally didn’t operate — the beetles would have driven them out or consumed them. The territory was as clear as he was likely to find.
First priority after setting camp: equipment inventory.
The fight had been expensive in ammunition. Slingshot pellets were the worst loss — most of them had vanished into beetle bodies or gone deep into the road surface, unrecoverable. All seven remaining fang arrows were in final disrepair, beyond further use after this engagement. Fully expended.
The loss stung. He had Thieving Crow cores still, and now a large supply of Giant Stag beetle cores — enough raw material to grind a new batch of arrows and pellets. And there were still eight mutant canine teeth in his collection, one of the better arrowhead materials available.
He settled in for a long night of grinding work.
By the early hours, he had a functional new arsenal assembled.
Canine tooth arrows: 4 from Dahaizi’s teeth (Activity Value 0.508H), 4 from Wu Wenjun’s teeth (0.397H). These were premium stock — mutant human canines were dense and Activity-rich in a way animal cores weren’t, at least at this tier.
Thieving Crow claw joint pellets: 88 units at approximately 0.16H each. Ground from the small claw joints, these were reliable mid-range slingshot ammunition.
And the new category.
The large black beetles had a distinctive shape he recognised: the bifurcated horn structure, the heavy frontal capsule, the general body plan. A species called the Chinese Giant Stag beetle — a real insect, pre-apocalypse, notable for exactly these features. The evolved version had kept the form and weaponised it.
Giant Stag Beetles, he decided. Da Qiao Chong.
He wrote up the field entry:
Giant Stag Beetle — mutated coleopteran, classified as evolved beast. Morphology consistent with Chinese Giant Stag beetle (Dorcus hopei). Head capsule including paired bifurcated horns constitutes Activity core. Dorsal wing cases: dense, non-Activity core, but highly resistant to conventional ballistic impact. Behaviour: colonial, fossorial. Cognitive level: low. Typical readings: Lv0.638, Activity Value 0.154H, Talent 0.243H.
The mother beetle — dissected, confirmed female by the yellow-brown egg mass in the abdomen — had also yielded an explanation for the colony’s small size. Her body cavity contained numerous metal fragments. Shrapnel. The garrison’s explosives had hit her directly, and she’d never fully healed. Reduced to limited breeding capacity, the colony had been a fraction of its potential strength when he’d encountered it.
This was a crippled colony.
At full strength, with multiple queens, the garrison would have faced an entirely different problem even with their heavy fire support and evolved-person contingent. What Shen Cong had cleared today was the diminished remnant of something genuinely dangerous.
Mother Giant Stag data: Lv0.561, Activity Value 0.169H, Talent 0.301H. Lower Activity Value than the males, higher Talent ceiling.
Now for the resource accounting.
Each Giant Stag beetle had a pair of bifurcated horns — four tips per beetle, all grindable into arrowheads. Combined total from the road encounter and the nest clearance: two hundred and sixteen beetles, yielding 864 potential arrowheads from standard males. Plus the mother’s single remaining horn pair: two more tips, made into javelins at 0.169H — a matched pair.
Total new arrow stock: 864 Giant Stag arrows at Activity Value slightly below the fang arrows and Thieving Claw arrows — adequate for small to mid-tier evolved beasts, well above the worker-ant baseline.
The losses from the fight had been replaced, and then some.
Head capsules — collected in bulk. Activity cores, which meant post-injection they could resist moderate bone-gold weapons, not just ballistics. These went to Vajra’s front plate, fitted piece by piece across the forward armour. Dorsal wing cases — non-Activity-core but ballistically resistant — were mounted to the exterior cargo panels of the fire truck. Another layer of protection for the convoy’s supplies.
He finished at 1 AM.
Shen Cong decided he’d earned a late meal.
The mother beetle’s egg mass was the available ingredient.
He dropped one experimentally in front of Blackhead. The ant consumed it in seconds and immediately communicated an unambiguous more through their bond. Blackhead’s judgment on food was reliable enough to serve as an initial palate test.
He suppressed a minor aesthetic hesitation and put one in the pot.
Scaled up to the size these eggs were, the category of “insect egg” was considerably less objectionable than it sounded. What he was looking at, sitting in the boiling water, was effectively an oversized egg. The shell structure, the exterior colour, the dimensions — not meaningfully different from a very large chicken egg.
He peeled it when it was done. Inside: pale yellow yolk-meat, soft and tender.
One bite. The texture was close to egg. The flavour was milder, slightly blander. He reached into the kitchen cabinet for a jar of Lao Gan Ma chili sauce, dipped the next piece, and reassessed.
With chili sauce: excellent.
“Good stuff,” he said to no one.
He put two more in the pot. The remaining few went into the truck’s small refrigerator.
These are not for Blackhead to finish off.
(End of Chapter 118)