One or two mutated creatures didn’t concern him much anymore. He’d calibrated his threat responses across enough encounters that a single Burrower or Fangwolf barely registered. Prehistoric crocodile scale was where his attention sharpened.

Bottle-sized ants were not prehistoric crocodile scale.

But there were over a hundred of them, and he was watching through the telescope as the leading group reached the nearest car wreck and simply started eating it. Not breaking it apart — eating it. The metal dissolved under the collective assault with a speed that turned his stomach slightly, the wreck collapsing from a defined structure into a scattered residue in the time it took him to process what he was seeing.

They eat metal.

The group finished the first wreck and moved to the next one without pausing.

He didn’t dive back into Vajra immediately. He had a little time, and he needed to think.

Option one was straightforward: leave. Running from a fight he didn’t need to have was a legitimate tactical choice, not a failure of nerve. He’d internalized that principle years ago and didn’t feel any particular pressure to revisit it. Creatures that could eat metal posed a specific threat to Vajra that most mutated animals didn’t, and a hundred metal-eating ants represented a meaningful danger even to reinforced armor plating.

Option two was eliminating the group. They were moving toward him, which simplified the geometry. A hundred targets at the current spacing, steel ball bearings, his slingshot at full draw — the math was roughly one ball per ant, which was a finite problem. He had the ammunition. He had the accuracy. He was confident in his ability to keep them off Vajra through the window gap while picking off the approach.

The question that complicated option two was the one every person who’d ever read anything about ants would ask: is this all of them?

Ant colony structure meant foraging workers operated as the advance element. Find a food source, return to recruit, bring numbers proportional to the opportunity. A hundred workers implied a colony behind them. If this was a scouting party rather than the full group —

He ran the scenarios for another few seconds, watching the ants dismantle a second wreck.

The salvage work here is effectively complete. There’s no compelling reason to stay and fight something I don’t need to fight.

He made the call and started moving.

He’d underestimated the engine noise.

The moment Vajra’s three-cylinder combination fired up, the ants stopped eating. Through the periscope camera, he watched them orient toward the sound simultaneously — the particular coordinated response of insects that communicated through vibration and pheromone rather than deliberation. A hundred heads swinging toward a noise source, and then a hundred bodies accelerating in the same direction.

Vajra’s top speed on this terrain, navigating around rock formations and filled-in drainage channels, was considerably below the ants’ running pace.

They’re faster than I can drive here.

He killed the engine.

The calculation was simple. Outrunning them wasn’t possible on this surface. Which meant the encounter was going to happen regardless of whether he chose it. Given that it was inevitable, initiating on his own terms and timeline was better than reacting to them climbing the hull.

He opened the window facing the incoming swarm, picked up the slingshot, and loaded the first steel ball.

The slingshot he used was a simple metal-frame design of his own making — no commercial features, just the geometry he’d refined over years of practice. The quality of a slingshot was almost entirely in the elastic, and Shen Cong had been collecting and testing band materials for years, buying in bulk when he found a batch he liked. His current setup used a twelve-strand configuration of Banglis elastic, which at his current strength level he could draw to 150 centimeters of extension. At that draw weight and with steel ball bearings as projectiles, he had reliable killing power out to a hundred meters.

His best recorded session — 20-centimeter target at 20 meters, 20 minutes, 134 hits out of maximum possible. The Guinness record for that standard, held by a civilian enthusiast, was 147. At longer ranges, he’d hit leaves at 200 meters with steel balls, though consistency dropped significantly at that distance due to projectile drift.

The Activity enhancement had changed the practical ceiling considerably. More draw weight meant flatter trajectory at distance, more terminal velocity at impact, more consistent results in crosswind.

He shot by feel — angled grip, no formal aiming, letting his subconscious process the geometry faster than his conscious mind could interfere. Deliberate aiming, he’d found years ago, was slower and less accurate than trained intuition. The eye-hand-release loop, properly conditioned, produced better results when he didn’t think about it.

The first ant was eighty meters out when he released.

Thwack.

The steel ball caught it at the thorax-abdomen junction and nearly separated the two sections. The ant tumbled, twitched, stopped moving.

He already had the second ball loaded.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

The rhythm was almost meditative — pick up ball, load, draw, feel, release, pick up ball. He wasn’t thinking about accuracy. He was thinking about nothing, which meant the trained reflexes were doing exactly what years of daily practice had built them to do.

Seven more dead before the leading ants reached Vajra’s hull and the angle made the slingshot impractical.

He closed the window.

Cut a piece of Tumour-Pig meat — Activity-rich, strongly attractive to mutated creatures — and held it near the sealed window. Opened it again.

The ants redirected immediately toward the food source, which funneled them toward the single opening. He braced the left hand with a steel plate cut to fit the window gap, matchlock-style, and took the fang-knife in the right.

One ant in the opening: one slash. Two ants: plate in, dispatch both, plate out. Three ants: plate, dispatch, open, continue.

The window was the only variable. Vajra’s sealed hull meant there was only one point of engagement, and he controlled that point completely. It was, as he observed to himself with mild amusement, somewhat like a wave-survival mode — enemy units approaching a fixed defensive position, dealt with in sequence, the architecture of the situation doing most of the tactical work for him.

Six waves. Seven waves. The rhythm held.

On the eighth pause between engagements, he looked up through the camera.

The horizon had changed.

What had been clear terrain was now a moving line — dark, dense, spreading across his field of view in both directions. And at the edges of the camera frame, something else: shapes considerably larger than the worker ants he’d been killing, moving with different purpose.

Soldiers.

He looked at the scale of what was coming and felt his expression go flat.

How is there a colony this large?

(End of Chapter 22)