Stalemate

The snow has stopped.

The wind had died down, and the mountain forest was eerily quiet.

After the ant colony chased away the strange beasts that had crossed the boundary to forage, the edge of the swamp was completely empty. The centipedes and anteaters hadn't gone far; they had all hidden themselves deep in the tree root holes and thick piles of fallen leaves, not daring to make a sound. Occasionally, the rustling sound of dry leaves rustling through the forest drifted by, very light, and disappeared in an instant, like a bunch of hidden eyes, staring at the center of the swamp from afar.

Lu Heng lay sprawled on a thick tree branch, his hands gripping the protruding thorns in the bark. The bark was so cold it was piercing his skin, and his fingertips were already numb with cold. He hunched his shoulders slightly, his gaze fixed on the swamp below, refusing to look away even an inch.

The scene now is completely different from the chaotic battle just now.

All the Digger Ants stopped scattering and chasing the scattered slippery fish. Instead, they all piled up on the giant slippery fish in the center of the swamp, their pincers constantly gnawing at it, and acid continuously seeping from its belly.

It's obvious at a glance that this siege was a complete waste of time from beginning to end.

The Slippery Fish King was covered in a thick layer of mucus. It had been shiny and slippery before, but after being gnawed by the Insect Swarm for a long time, it was now dry and thin in patches, sticking to its body in mottled patches. In many places, the mucus had been completely worn away, revealing the firm and hard skin underneath. Even so, the outer skin was still intact, without even a crack.

From beginning to end, the giant beast was completely unharmed.

Its body was mostly buried in the frozen black mud, remaining motionless for most of the time, letting small insects crawl all over its body. However, its patience was getting worse and worse, and every ten seconds or so it would suddenly shake its body.

With just a simple tremor, the swarm of ants clinging to his body was crushed in swathes, their black corpses sliding down with the mud and snow, piling up layer upon layer in the muddy puddle beneath him.

The insect corpses soaked in the melting snow, slowly oozing out whitish, murky foam. A sour, putrid smell mixed with the stench of mud and silt drifted upwards with the cold wind, rushing into his nostrils. Lu Heng subconsciously frowned and slightly turned his head to avoid the gust of wind.

Watching wave after wave of ants and insects die below, only to have new ones immediately emerge from the mud burrows at the edge of the forest to fill their places, an endless cycle, he felt a strange, inexplicable unease weighing on his mind.

He wasn't an expert on wildlife ecology. He used to watch a few episodes of documentaries about ants and termites while scrolling through short videos during his night shift breaks, but he didn't really take them to heart, only vaguely remembering some basic knowledge.

Normal ant colonies wouldn't fight this hard.

Insects are naturally inclined to cherish their lives. If the losses become too great, their instinct will urge the colony to retreat and cut its losses. They would never risk the lives of thousands of worker ants to fight a prey whose defenses they cannot break through.

The current behavior of this group of Digger Ants for food completely contradicts their common sense.

Lu Heng subconsciously rubbed his frozen knuckles, his mind replaying fragments of the scenes he had encountered along the way, checking them bit by bit, not daring to draw any conclusions directly, always suspecting that a mutated beast had broken the laws of ordinary creatures.

A few days ago, one cold wave after another hit, causing a sharp drop in temperature. Large areas of swamp water froze into hard mud, completely changing the environment of the entire wetland.

It wasn't until he stepped into this area today that he encountered a new variable: a large number of birds couldn't withstand the low temperature and fell into the swamp. As soon as their bodies hit the ground, slippery fish hiding in the shallow silt burrowed in and devoured them. In just half a day, the swamp was teeming with small slippery fish.

When they first started Digger Ants, they were very careful with their movements.

They only hunt and kill the common slippery fish that dart around randomly. The Insect Swarm advances and retreats, and after some of them die, they briefly retreat back to the woodland to rest. This is a normal pattern of natural predator control.

But everything changed after that giant slippery fish emerged from the ground.

The ant colony completely abandoned its usual restraint, rushing headlong at the dominant ant, knowing only how to exhaust its strength and not how to retreat.

Lu Heng's heart skipped a beat. A guess slowly surfaced in his mind, and he kept asking himself, "Could I be thinking the wrong thing?"

These worker ants weren't there to defeat the Slippery Fish King; they were just consumables used to wear down the outer slime shield.

The swarm didn't care about the lives of the worker ants at the bottom. They first wore down and rendered ineffective the natural defenses of the slippery fish, and absorbed all the initial losses. The thing that could truly contend with this behemoth was still hidden beneath the forest soil and hadn't yet shown itself.

Thinking of this, a chill inexplicably ran down my spine.

He looked up at the woodland where the ant colony had emerged. The ground was quiet, with only a steady stream of ordinary worker ants crawling out from the cracks in the soil. There was no large-scale disturbance of the Insect Swarm beneath the soil, nor any soil cracking caused by the movement of large insects.

It's not that they lack combat power; they're just deliberately suppressing it.

The ant colony is waiting for a critical point.

Once the slime on the surface of the slippery fish is completely depleted, and the worker ants are mostly gone, the entire battlefield is completely transformed by the acid-laden insect corpses, and then the trump card hidden underground is released.

The Slippery Fish King in the center of the swamp seemed to have also noticed this deliberate depletion.

Each time it trembled to Insect Tide swarm of insects, the amplitude of its movements gradually increased, and the frozen soil beneath it was constantly pressed down by its heavy body, making the mud pits deeper and deeper. It still did not actively retaliate to kill the ant colony, but just lay dormant quietly, as if it had experienced this scene every year, knowing that the swarm of insects in front of it was just an insignificant prelude, and the real threat was still buried deep underground.

The strange beasts hiding deep in the forest had far more acute senses than Lu Heng.

Every now and then, a few twigs swayed slightly. No beast dared to step out of the dense forest's edge; they all huddled in their hiding places, holding their breath and watching. They had lived here year-round and had witnessed countless autumn and winter cycles of the swamp. They knew that once the core insect in the depths of the forest broke through the soil, the entire middle-layer swamp would become a deadly wasteland with nowhere to escape.

The stalemate continues.

The density of worker ants rushing forward was visibly thin, wave after wave dying, and the basic Insect Swarm stored on the periphery was almost exhausted. The pile of insect corpses in the mud was thick, and acid seeped into the frozen soil, corroding the originally black soil into patches of light gray marks.

The Slippery Fish King twisted its body violently once more, crushing a large number of ants and insects into a pulp. Mud splattered and landed on the withered grass in the distance, leaving blackened stains. It remained intact, its massive body firmly rooted in the center of the battlefield, like an unshakable mud mountain.

On one side is an endless Insect Tide from the lower levels, fighting to the death; on the other side is the swamp overlord, indifferent to everything and firmly holding its ground.

There were no explosive clashes, no fierce offensive and defensive battles, only a silent, cruel, and day-to-day standoff of attrition.

But this quiet stalemate felt suffocating.

All the tragic sacrifices were just the prologue; the real battle that would determine the fate of the entire swamp's ecosystem had yet to begin.

Lu Heng held his breath again, his gaze fixed on the deep layers of soil in the entire forest.

The wind and snow completely stopped, and all was silent. The strange beasts hidden in the forest, the worker ants that kept offering sacrifices, and the quietly lurking Slippery Fish King —all living things were quietly waiting for the movement from underground.

Not long after, a very deep and slow tremor came from deep within the thick layer of humus in the woodland.

It wasn't the faint, chaotic trembling of countless tiny insects crawling, but the slow movement of a single, gigantic body that made the entire ground tremble slightly, a heavy sense of oppression spreading through the layers of soil.

The Ant Queen, who had been hiding underground and biding her time, finally moved.