"Crack!"
The giant ant's red forelimb snapped, and with its waist already badly wounded by her earlier attack, it lost its balance and toppled to the ground.
The giant ant immediately stood back up, but this time, instead of lunging at Wen Jing again as it had throughout their fight, its body shook violently, its limbs rubbing together to produce a high-frequency sound accompanied by a powerful burst of pheromones.
Wen Jing's heart lurched. No way, this thing...
Just then, the giant ant fearlessly tangled with her again.
Wen Jing swiftly dodged sideways, biting off its antenna at the same time.
Two more attacks would surely kill it, but sensing what was coming, she stopped pressing the fight. Gravity Silk spread outward as she prepared to retreat while fighting.
However, right at that moment-
One, ten, a hundred... Countless black-and-red figures approached from every direction, their six legs making a teeth-grating rustle as they raced in perfect unison toward Wen Jing's branch like a well-trained army.
"Trash! Trash! Trash..."
Even as they charged, they did not forget to shoot pheromones at Wen Jing.
From a single ant, these pheromones were a taunt. From an entire ant army, they were an absolutely terrifying threat. The second source of danger Wen Jing had sensed earlier had already vanished; she did not know whether it had been overwhelmed or simply fled.
"Whoosh!"
Wen Jing's insect body darted aside, dodging another pounce.
Even now, the giant ant whose body was almost severed was still attacking, fully intent on keeping her here even if it died.
"No martial virtue. Bad review!"
Wen Jing whipped her tail, flinging it away and lowering her five-star review of it to 3.5. Then her rear abdomen twitched, activating the farthest strands of Gravity Silk.
The next moment, faced with an encirclement formed by an ever-growing ant army, the little silver-gray insect did not try to break through in another direction. She simply left the trunk and took off on the spot!
Chapter 22
Didn't see that coming, did you? I can fly!
Wen Jing floated away on a strand of Gravity Silk stuck to a branch overhead.
She had thought the flightless ants could only stare helplessly, but the menacing ant army refused to give up, seemingly not realizing they could no longer catch her.
They surrounded her from every direction, even spontaneously dividing their labor and lining up one after another to form a human ladder... no, an ant ladder, allowing other ants to climb up and build a cone-shaped ant tower.
The sight made Wen Jing's scalp crawl, and she immediately sped up the contraction of her Gravity Silk.
She was pulling away from the ant army, reaching a distance they could not bridge no matter how high they stacked themselves, when she saw their formation change again.
Abandoning their stack, they stood on the trunk, raised their stingers, and rubbed them with their middle pair of legs.
As they rubbed, beads of golden liquid condensed on their stingers, growing larger and larger until they reached a certain size...
"Pfft! Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!"
The ant army turned into valiant bombardiers, hurling golden-yellow resin shells nearly half her body size at Wen Jing.
Being fierce in melee was bad enough. How do they have ranged attacks too?!
Wen Jing cursed inwardly, remembering how the lone giant ant had thrown a lump of resin at her when they first met. Back then, she had thought it was cargo the ant was transporting, used as an improvised weapon upon encountering an enemy. She had not expected it to be one of the giant ants' actual means of attack.
Poisonous or not, its ability to envelop her in sticky resin alone meant that, at her current size, one hit would rob her of most of her mobility.
The golden resin shells were densely packed and traveled at varying speeds, making them far harder to dodge than the rubber bullets fired during the unified exam's reaction test.
Not only did the giant ants have astonishing arm strength, launching the resin at tremendous speed, but more importantly, the "bullets" differed in size. Every resin shell was a "boulder" relative to Wen Jing's current body.
An attack she could have dodged with a slight turn of her human body now required her insect body to shift more than half its width.
Facing resin clumps that swept toward her like a violent storm, Wen Jing dared not let her attention wander for even a moment. She frantically manipulated her Gravity Silk, pulling on anchor points in different directions to adjust her position in midair. Had the silk not existed between illusion and reality, she probably would have worked it hard enough to throw sparks.
It was not just the basic fixed anchors above, below, left, and right. Later, even the resin shells themselves became her moving anchors.
The little silver-gray insect threaded through the barrage of resin like a phantom. A single mistake would mean getting hit.
"Whoosh!"
At last, after weathering the fiercest wave, Wen Jing found an opening during the giant ants' "reload" interval as they produced more resin. The exoskeleton on her back grazed a clump of resin as she broke through the barrage.
[Mastered 'Movement Technique - Advanced Movement Technique Lv2', skill points +5]
Before she could rejoice at the notification in her consciousness, Wen Jing felt a weight on her back. She had still inevitably gotten a little resin on her.
Through her wide-area vision, she could see a layer of golden slime coating her back's exoskeleton.
She had only picked up this little because she had kept shaking her back while dodging. Otherwise, given the resin shells' viscosity and tension, one touch would have pulled an entire clump onto her, not this small amount.
Now Wen Jing felt the resin on her back rapidly seeping into the gaps in her exoskeleton. Along with the stickiness came a faint burning pain.
This is bad. There seems to be ant venom in this resin too... Her heart tightened.
If the resin were merely sticky, it would at most slightly hinder the contraction of her back and add a little weight that affected her balance. Wen Jing could compensate for both with Gravity Silk, but not poison.
As the saying went, ants could bite an elephant to death. Ant venom needed to accumulate to paralyze a large creature, but she was smaller than an ant. Even a single ant's venom could affect her.
"Evolve resistance specifically against this ant venom." Wen Jing communicated with the panel, narrowing the scope of evolution and setting it to "specialized resistance."
[Evolution direction confirmed...] [Consuming points to evolve...] [15 → 14] [Evolution complete] [Trait acquired: ?? Ant Venom Resistance]
Instantly, Wen Jing felt the burning in her back recede, and just as she had expected, it had cost very few skill points.
At a time like this, she did not dare simply evolve general poison resistance. Who knew whether the panel would max it out directly and spend all her skill points at once?
As for the remaining resin on her back, she would carry it for now. It should fall off after she returned, and she could even take it to Xie Ming and ask whether it could be sold for points.
After breaking through, Wen Jing landed on another branch. With the many leaves and main trunk blocking her view and separating them, the ant army was no longer visible.
However, just as she breathed a sigh of relief and prepared to continue exploring-
"Trash! Trash! Trash..."
A black tide even larger and denser than the one on the previous branch rounded the main trunk, forming spiraling black lines as it surged toward her.
Their aggro lock-on range is way too long!
They were just like bugged mobs in a game, chasing someone to the ends of the earth after one auto-attack. And these mobs had linked aggro: hit one, and the entire colony mobilized.
What were they tracking her with? The first ant's blood, or the pheromones she had picked up during the fight?
And judging by their numbers, this was definitely not just the group that had pursued her on the previous branch. Other, new ant colonies had joined in too.
At this sight, Wen Jing's temper flared. She watched the ant army, a cold gleam shining in her pitch-black compound eyes.
"Fine, fine, fine. So that's how you want to play?"
Among the giant tree's tangled branches, a strangely shaped purplish-red scorpion rested in the shade. Behind it, a smaller branch seemed to have undergone some sort of mutation... or rather, disease.
It was covered in an unknown white fungus, and even its leaves had turned grayish-white. Among those grayish-white leaves hung a blue-purple fruit about the size of a cherry.
The fruit gave off strange energy fluctuations. One glance made it clear that it was no ordinary thing.
But this was clearly the strange scorpion's territory. With it guarding the place, no other nearby creature dared approach.
Just then, a faint breeze seemed to pass.
The eight legs of the prone scorpion moved almost imperceptibly. It appeared merely to adjust its position, but in reality, it had already shifted from resting to alertness.
Its eyesight was poor, but through vibrations in the air and ground and changes in airflow, it sensed that a creature whose size marked it as "prey," posing no threat, had entered its territory.
To the ruler of this branch, this was undoubtedly an act of provocation.
The sensory hairs on the strange scorpion's shell rose one by one. Energy stirred within its body as it poised to strike, quietly waiting for its prey to take the bait.
Before long, a little silver-gray insect drifted into the area, bobbing up and down.
Upon entering the area, the insect was immediately drawn to the blue-purple fruit giving off energy fluctuations on the branch. Almost all Ancient Wilderness creatures instinctively felt this attraction, whether or not they were herbivores.
Sensing this small fry approaching its attack range, the strange scorpion suddenly lunged like a tank. Its flexible, sharp tail hook swept out in a blur, stabbing toward the little insect.
"Whoosh!"
With a sound of cleaving air, the scorpion's tail hook struck nothing.
"Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!"
The scorpion's reactions and speed were extremely fast. When its first strike missed, it swiftly adjusted its angle and stabbed at the little insect more than a dozen times, only to miss every time.
The strange scorpion's limbs moved more frequently, betraying its agitation.