Re:Ant Lord-Chapter 87: Departure

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The next 72 hours blurred. Kai sparred with Shale beneath brass gongs. The four star’s ant hammer blows nearly cracked Kai’s shell, but each parry etched fresh muscle memory.

Needles spread dune charts across a mess hall table. There was thin paper marked with red pins (oasis), blue pins (raider nests), black skulls (Ruler type or predator sign). Kai memorized routes until lines danced behind his eyelids.

Mia drifted through these scenes like a quiet comet. She spoke little yet saw everything: adjusting Shale’s stance, tracing new paths on Needle’s charts, time to time Kai pressing a cool cloth to Renna’s wound.

Night before departure, Kai found Mia on a terrace overlooking the lantern-lit city. Sand colored armor hung over a cedar stand; she wore only a thin training tunic, hair braided.

The air between them tingled, awkward but gentle.

"Kai," she said without turning, "tomorrow we step onto a stage where my sister shines. She will try again to break morale. Stand firm."

"I will," he answered.

Moonlight drew pale shapes along her arms. He remembered towel-clad curves, the accidental press of his hardness. Shame stirred inside him but so did quiet longing. He clenched his fists.

"Mia... about that night..."

She raised a hand. "Future battles drown past blushes," she said, voice faintly teasing. "Survive the desert. Then we’ll speak."

Warm relief flooded him. Survive, he echoed inwardly.

They stayed till midnight under silent stars. Not a single word was spoken, just a silent company.

Next day... The day of departure.

The sky burned copper above the west ramparts. Columns of soldiers filled the queen’s road, bronze helms glinting, banner tassels whipping. Wagons laden with cask-water and resin crates creaked under rope lashings. Beetle cavalry snorted.

Cerastis Banner assembled near Gate Seventeen, fifty feet shy of Coatl Banner. Tension vibrated between the rival groups like a drawn bowstring.

Princess Mia mounted a dune-runner (fast six-leg lizard) and raised her spear. "Cerastis, forward!"

At the front of the overall convoy strode the Queen herself, she was still veiled but this time armored in plates of dawn-glass that refracted pink light into rainbows. Her aura wrapped the army in calm steel.

She stopped at the threshold arch and spoke only four words, amplified by crystal tubes:

"Bring our future home."

Then she stepped aside, allowing the flood to pass. She would join later, traveling by sky-carriage with court scholars, war generals and some elite royal guards.

Trumpets blared. Drums boomed. The great gates groaned outward.

Mia’s dune-runner hissed, claws scraping. She pointed her spear west, toward a ribbon of gold dust swirling on the horizon.

"Cerastis march!"

Kai adjusted his pack and followed his captain into the rising light. He was holding the flag. Vexor gripping the rails. Shale and Flint flanked the column, alert for ambush.

Ahead, Thea’s banner jogged like a black spearpoint, Darius glancing back only once with a grin that promised storms.

Thus, under the banners of crimson and obsidian, the Ant-Kingdom’s greatest march in a century began toward shifting dunes, a dying god like worm, and fates will be written in burning sand.

And in Kai’s chest, resolve hardened: he would become the weapon Mia believed he could be, crush Darius’s smug smile into dust, and return not merely alive but triumphant.

Far far away, the desert winds howled in welcome.

Soon grass faded by degrees, each new mile trading green for brittle gray. Acacia thickets shrank to bone-white scrub. On the seventh dawn Cerastis Banner climbed a basalt ridge and the desert yawned beyond: a copper ocean frozen mid-tempest. Dunes rose like waves, thirty strides tall, scalloped by wind into dagger-ridges; the troughs lay shadowed and cold, promising ambushes in every fold.

Princess Mia reined her dune-runner at the crest. Behind her twenty warriors halted, packs rustling. Kai found himself beside Shale, the massive four-star ant whose hammer axe lay across his back like a toppled monolith.

A hush fell. Far ahead marched black-armored dots Coatl Banner, Thea’s company already descending the first slope.

Mia spoke, voice pitched for her soldiers alone. "From this line forward, water is life. We ration: two gulps at dawn, two at dusk. Shade tents only at night. Stay out of any inner conflicts."

She pointed to a line of pale smoke pluming in the south-west. "That is Furnace Rift. It marks the start of the Ruler’s demesne. We will send scouts to skirt it tomorrow."

Needle and Ash (one of the Dustmere twins) saluted, they would take the first recon shift.

"Move." Mia’s runner hissed and bounded down the sand sheet; warriors followed at half-trot, sand-shoes dispersing weight. Kai tasted grit instantly. Hot wind carved his mandibles. But the pull inside his chest that magnetic drive toward power, vengeance, and desire dragged him onward.

Mid-afternoon, after eight blistering miles, the banner reached a salt pan, a flat, white plate stretching hundreds of yards. Old dunes flanked it, leaning inward like silent spectators. Mia signaled a halt beneath a crumbly ridge of gypsum so small it cast barely a hand-width of shade.

Kai knelt, shaking sand from his knee joints. He checked his inner readouts:

HP 99 % (The hot sun made him lose some.)

Aura 100 % (Still strong; no skills used yet.)

Soul-Cube (Star crystal milk flask sealed, 48 star crystals secure.)

Shale passed a gourd. Kai drank one slow gulp. The water tasted of canvas and minerals, but bliss nonetheless. Needle and Ash had not returned.

Minutes dragged. Mia’s antennae flicked like tuning forks. "They’re late," she murmured.

Suddenly crk-crk-crk! three flare clacks echoed among dunes. "Something is coming," Shale snarled.

From the far lip of the salt pan a plume of white dust rose, two figures sprinting: Needle first, "Run! Glass Crawler is behind you." Ash limping. Behind them the ground bulged, cracked, and broke as something vast tunneled just beneath the crust. A ripple racing faster than a galloping lizard.

Kai’s heart slammed. "Glass-Crawler!"

He’d read of them while training. It’s apex arthropods that swam beneath salt flats, using static to liquify grains into razor slush, devouring travelers from below. Catalogued threat: 4-Star Beast, Subterranean Class.