Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 231: That’s How You Get Ants

Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)

Class: Potent Thaumaturge

Level 16

HP: 11

Body: 73

Stability: 73

Nerve: 73

Attunement: 72

Free Points: 0

XP to next level: 35527

Perry checked his multipliers once he was done distributing everything to keep them even.

1.05^73= 35.22

Yikes.

All aboard for the Perry runaway train. He’d be way over 100 on every stat by level 20.

The exact numbers flashed through his mind unbidden. They were…large numbers.

If only Tyrannus believed I wouldn’t go full murderhobo.

In order to get those levels, he’d have to kill…a lot of very influential people. According to his aborted quest, to conquer Franklin, Solaris himself was only worth 30k. Gorm, a society ending threat, was only about 20k.

The reason Solaris was worth more is because the old man had a brain, and if he really wanted, he could most likely destroy all life on Earth and Manita by hurling a bowling ball at the speed of light at both of them, while Gorm was literally just an angry bird.

So, while Perry could in theory grow astoundingly fast, there weren’t many people on Earth worth that much XP, and Perry was on a first-name basis with most of them.

Working out wasn’t netting Perry XP anymore, and arresting criminals barely gave him any at all.

And yet…the dragon was trying to kill him because, if Perry decided he was dead-set on getting to level 20 regardless of who had to die along the way…he probably could do it. In a rather short period of time, too.

Tyrannus was not operating on what Perry would do, but what he could do, given the right motivation.

Trying to kill Perry was pretty motivating.

Still. Don’t shit where you eat. Can’t go murderhobo on Earth without unacceptable consequences. If only there was a realm full of evil spirits that no one would mourn the loss of that I could farm for XP.

If only in that realm was a faction of people who held Tyrannus’s leash.

If only that faction was in constant conflict with every other faction in that realm.

If only I had access to one of those other factions who might move against them in exchange for bespoke armor and weapons.

If only I had a self-replicating death-machine to sow destruction across the realm.

…So how can I factor the ant problem into my half-baked plan? They’re kind of self-replicating death machines, but they lack a certain…je ne sais quoi.

People and demons will eventually out think them. One way or another. It’s not a good permanent solution to the demon problem. But it could create a foothold…

So many people talked about dividing big problems into smaller pieces and solving them one at a time, but Perry preferred to throw a bunch of big problems together in a tiny cage and shake ‘em up until they started killing each other.

Perry glanced back up at Nat, who was moving her arm to indicate where the ants were coming from, about to explain the ant situation.

Perry mustered his attention, stopping his high-speed train of thought.

“They’re each approximately one hundred and fifty kilograms, standing about this high,” Nat said, raising her hand high above her head.

“So about normal adult human height. Got it,” the rainbow unicorn captain said with a firm nod.

Nat, now having experience with toddlers, ignored Casey.

“They seem to be descended from fire ants, which means they’re going to be highly aggressive, and they’ve got stingers to watch out for as well.

“We seem to have gotten lucky because there’s no sign of intelligence or teleportation, but we’ve seen the soldiers shrug off some pretty high ordinance, so they’ve got a durability mutation, at least, in addition to whatever cocktail of mutations is allowing them to ignore the square cube law.”

“How much damage do the gun emplacements do?” Perry asked.

“Difficult to confirm,” Nat said, frowning at the map.

“The big guns send the ants flying,” Casey said, making a long arc with his hand. “Tough to locate afterwards.

Although he was a doofus, his squad had the lowest turnaround, and had, in fact, slowly grown over time to something closer to a company. And despite his traumatic run-in with a Lockjaw Slime, seemed to have decided the soldier’s life was for him.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“How do the trolls handle them?” Perry asked.

“We haven’t deployed the trolls against them yet. An unarmed troll might have a tough time winning a fight against one of these things, and there’s never just one. A fully armed troll will probably make short work of them.” Nat said.

“And then eat them.” Perry said, thinking. “We did promise the trolls meat and action during High Tide,” Perry said with a shrug.

“Right, but there’s no sense allowing the fight to go on longer than it has to if we have a quick solution. Do we have a quick solution?” Nat asked, looking up at him. Clearly she suspected.

“Well…I’ve been toying with a brilliant idea recently called ‘make it someone else’s problem,’” Perry admitted.

“You’re not planning on unleashing ants on the Empire’s civilians, are you?” she said, giving him a look verging on Disappointment.

“No, no,” Perry said, waving it off. “I got more appropriate in mind. Give me a couple hours to set up something.”

Perry went back to his lair, grabbed a syringe with Eugene’s go-juice, printed an inactive portal to a very specific part of Nargosh. One whose leader hung up on him.

Obviously Perry was doing this for better reasons than a minor slight, but you know… Why not both?

He made a few calls and then was ready to go.

While ants were a serious threat that swarmed across the land like ravaging armies, consuming everything they could get their mandibles on and adding the biomass to their own…they didn’t have ground-penetrating scanners and air support.

They had a few fliers, but those were the young queens and males, whose job was to breed and move on, not act as strong anti-air.

They shot them out of the sky. From what Perry could see, air-to-air missiles did indeed take ants out of the game, but missiles were way more expensive in bulk.

“There we go.” Perry said, locating the queen’s den, about one hundred and fifty feet beneath the surface.

A moment later, he had the exact coordinates of the center of the nest.

Portal.exe

Perry gave the pilot the signal to retreat, then brought himself back to Chicago, where a glorious sight was waiting for him.

Eighty troll volunteers, including Karth, stood in a rough square, wearing high tech armor and hefting mass-produced Paradox cleavers the length of a man and sharp enough to split molecules.

“Gentlemen,” Perry said, looking up at them. “Eugene.” He patted the bioweapon’s head.

“We’re going to ruin a lot of people’s day today, and quite possibly die.”

The trolls cheered, a brutal, rib-shaking cry.

“Let’s get started.”

Portal.exe

As it turns out, bugs can be surprised.

A stream of howling trolls poured straight into the center of the ant colony, hewing and hacking everything they could get their blades on.

Five of them carried a massive stone obelisk, huffing with effort as they did. A moment later, they dropped the obelisk riddled with demonic script where Perry directed, causing the entire labyrinthine ant colony to shudder under its tremendous weight.

“Grab the queen,” Perry motioned to the largest ant, which dwarfed a full-sized troll. The trolls leapt on the gigantic monster, hauling it towards the obelisk as Perry himself put his palm on the portal and triggered the activation code.

The veil between dimensions stretched for a moment before tearing violently, plunging the underground cavern into the dark of Nargosh.

They fell what felt like a good three seconds before hitting the ground. Perry’s armor absorbed the shock and he was back on his feet in the blink of an eye.

Around them, war demons of every size and shape had paused their ceaseless battle for territory to stare at the newcomers. They had arrived in the center of a raging battlefield, bowling over dozens of armored demons, wielding every conceivable weapon from pikes to LMGs.

As it turned out, demons could be surprised, too.

“Greetings, gentlemen, I bring you a gift from Earth: Ants!” Perry said, motioning to the nearby trolls, who, through a combined effort, managed to toss the gigantic ant queen into the center of the battlefield.

The nearby demons looked confused until Perry released a flare, lighting up the tidal wave of ants boiling out of Norgosh’s angry sky, desperate to reach and protect their queen and kill everything nearby, whether it was responsible for her kidnapping or not.

It made no difference to them.

“Karth,” Perry said, kneeling down to administer Eugene’s go-juice. The insectoid bioweapon chuffed and pranced in place as its delayed reproductive processes began to kick in.

I’m sure that feels weird buddy, Perry thought, patting Eugene’s head.

“Yep?” Karth asked, standing nearby in the thick of the chaos.

“Test the edibility of the local demon population” Perry said.

Karth guffawed a loud, bellowing laugh that echoed above the harsh screams and clanging of metal, before raising his voice and issuing a much simpler command. The lead troll leveled his cleaver and pointed toward the demons between them and the rendezvous site Perry had arranged with Slak’vreth Deathseeker.

“FEAST!”

The Trolls surged forward, moving away from the flood of ants with all haste, cutting apart the demons with Perry’s blades and stuffing the vile creatures in their mouths.

“Eugene.”

The bioweapon glanced up at him.

“Up,” Perry said, pointing up.

Eugene’s legs bunched up beneath him and an instant later he bounded straight up, disappearing into the darkened sky covered with roiling clouds and red lightening.

A moment later, Eugene hit an unsuspecting demon at terminal velocity, cratering it into the ground before tearing out its guts and laying eggs in the chest cavity.

Eugene didn’t seem to know where this new instinct was coming from, looking a bit confused and sniffing the eggs he’d just laid.

“It’s fine, buddy, It’s all natural. In a few days, you’ll have lots of new friends to play with. Won’t that be nice?” Perry asked.

Eugene seemed to think so, prancing in place excitedly.

“Up!”

Eugene disappeared into the sky.

“Brings a tear to my eye,” Perry said, following along beside Karth as they carved a path through Alkush’s frontlines. The other troops he was in contention with had withdrawn, leaving the greater war demon to soak up the losses, weakening him.

Ooh, and demons do grant XP. Excellent.

“They’ve got a bit of a tangy taste to them,” Karth said, gnawing on a demon’s leg as they walked. “But nothing that couldn’t be fixed by proper meat preparation and a good smoke.”

“You really fell in love with barbeque, huh?” Perry asked.

“Whenever the opportunity presents itself,” Karth said, swallowing the leg whole.

Perry glanced behind and saw that the demons were rallying against the ants, but the sheer numbers pouring through the hole in the sky were pushing their lines back.

The ants in the center were beginning to dig, uncomfortable with their queen being on the surface, even if it was eternal night.

Dead demons were being dragged into the newly forming pit, where they would feed the next generation of ants. And Eugenes.

In any other situation, this would be a horrifying turn of events easily capable of falling int the ‘war crime’ category multiple times over, but these were the demons who embodied the evil of war itself.

Every single one of the demons had spawned from some act of horrifying cruelty, and given the opportunity, they would propagate another.

That was how they reproduced, after all.

The enemy demons thinned out after an hour or so of travel, until Perry saw Slak’vreth standing on top of a hill, most likely responsible for their thinning.

She was larger than the other demons around her, but not the football-field sized monstrosity Perry had gotten used to.

In the benighted plane of Norgosh, everything was relative, and size was meaningless. Instead the Greater War Demon’s presence felt like waves of power that radiated off her, threatening to bowl Perry over.

Perry turned to glance at Karth and the others, and found that they could go no further, kneeling and holding onto the surrounding stone, holding on for dear life like a gecko in a hurricane.

Slak’vreth Deathseeker waited on top of the hill, resting her wrists on the hilt of her damaged two-hander.

Perry grabbed the two-hander off its mag-lock on his back and made his way up the hill, struggling against the overwhelming power pressing down on him.

It pervaded the air. He could practically taste it.

Finally, Perry collapsed to one knee an arm’s length away, holding up the sword with shaking hands.

“To our continued cooperation,” Perry gritted out.

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