"Sorry, old friend." Nagano Souya, seated in White Tiger's cockpit, sighed. He reached out and grabbed the iron chain tied around the metal crate, then released the handhold on the heavy trailer.
"It was an honor to serve under you." The accountant's relieved voice came through the comms channel, followed by a dull gunshot.
The heavy trailer suddenly slowed, falling behind the White Tiger as it sped forward. Then it skidded sideways, overturned, rolled several times, and slammed heavily into an armored SUV charging up from behind.
With a deafening bang, flames shot into the sky. Countless flesh-eating ants frenziedly gnawed at the blazing corpses within the fire—they felt no pain, feared no death, and possessed no self-awareness. Their sole purpose after hatching was to consume as much biomass as possible in this world, then bring it back to the queen hidden deep within the nest.
The Dragon City Defense Army had launched two "extermination operations" in this area—the first had deployed dozens of bunker-busting bombs, directly killing the queen deep within the nest.
The second operation had used drones to pour huge amounts of oxygen-mixed gel incendiary through the holes into the nest, burning it clean.
But neither had worked. After only a short time, the flesh-eating ants would reappear in the area and breed another enormous colony.
The researchers discovered that whenever the queen died, the strongest surviving flesh-eating ant would immediately mutate into a new queen.
At first, the researchers believed this was caused by some kind of pheromone. But they soon discovered that the mutation had nothing to do with pheromones. Even if a surviving flesh-eating ant was far from the nest, it could still sense the queen's death and undergo this "inheritance-style" mutation.
This appeared to be an underlying logic embedded within the flesh-eating ants'