The sun was shining, the breeze was blowing and the birds were chirping, it was a beautiful scene. Well at least it would have been beautiful had it not been for the giant ants that had desided to interrupt Gordans travels.
The ants were the size of a large dog, and were quite angry for some reason. Gordan had been minding his own business walking along when suddenly an ant had attacked him from behind. He easily killed the ant and fed its corpse to the small egg which had gotten much faster at eating. Gordan had continued on his way and then run into three more ants, which all attacked him at once, in this encounter one of his hands were mildly damaged but they were still rather easy to get through. After the second attack Gordan Tried to deviate from his course but that only made him run into more ants, so he just decided to stay on the main course. He could see that even if the villagers wanted to leave they would have a hard time of it.
The ants reminded Gordan of the time that he had been in desert or summer part of the forest, only then he had to deal with scorpions, hundreds of thousands of large scorpions. Thinking about that time in his life Gordan sighed internally. It had been an interesting time back then, it had its ups and downs just like anything. Gordan quickly severed the head of one of the ants that he was fighting, the creature didn't even have time to scream. Gordan loosened his shoulders and looked around at the pile of corpses which was getting rather large, which posed a bit of a problem since it would attract other creatures that were looking for food. While this might cause Gordan some problems right now he didn't have the time or energy to deal with clean up. He started to walk away but he had a gut feeling that he would regret it.
Gordan put his head in his hand, and then an idea came to him. Pulling the egg out of his pocket and placed it on top of the pile of corpses and sat down to watch the show. He knew that he was losing daylight by playing clean up, but if he didn't something else would, and that might result in a precarious situation later down the line. That fact was especially true in this forest, infact it was even more of a deadly thing since the creatures that lived in the forest tended to level up in a sense when they ate enough. Gordan thought back to his time in the desert part of the forest when he had personally witnessed this happen. A group of people had left the corpses of hundreds of scorpions all in a pile, by the time Gordan came through a scorpion on the smaller side found the location. and quickly began devouring the pile at an extreamly fast rate. After only a few moments the small creature consumed hundreds of times it's own body mass, and now began to grow rapidly. Gordan could remember that the creature had screamed out in pain as it began to change, and in the end the group found themselves facing a humungous beast that could control sand.
Gordan shook his head to get rid of the memory, it wasn't a pleasant one. So many people had died, it was a fluke that they even beat it in the first place.
Gordan watched the egg devour the corpse, he marveled at how fast it was able to consume compared to the day before. Picking up the egg he was disappointed to see that the pattern had disappeared and the surface was now completely black, and it resembled a stone more than an egg now. Its corners had become all the way pointed and its sides had come in to make a flat surface. It was rather weird that the thing was growing at such an extreme rate, well at least he assumed it was an extreme rate. The thing was, he really didn't understand the parameters of what was considered normal for this type of thing, but he did have a theory that the rapid growth might have something to do with the rather unusual environment of the forest. Gordan pocketed the stone and started back on his journey. He had spent about half an hour on this so he needed to make up for the lost time. Well that was the plan anyway, but as he had antisipated things didn't go over so well.
The hill which was the source of all of the ants just so happened to be directly in his path and from the looks of it the hill hadn't been there all that long, which was in one scence good, since that ment that the system wasn't fully developed yet, the downside to this was that the ants would be much more hostile.
As Gordan approached the hill he saw something that he was not expecting. A carriage drawn by a team of six horses was dragging a rather large string of cages behind it. Gordan watched the scene from the shadows of the trees as two people jumped out of the carriage and opened up one of the cages releasing a giant ant which emidiatly went to the hill and entered without any hesitation.
Gordan noticed that the two people had a small insignia on their left shoulders. The sign was a lion eating a two headed snake, the insignia was one that Gordan had been recently introduce to. He looked down at the paper that he was supposed to deliver to the kingdom who had an alliance with the village and saw that the insignias were infact the same.
Gordan wondered why in the world they would do something as dangerous as monster farming, on the edge of the forest no less. Monster farming was an extremely difficult task to accomplish, the idea was to form an environment were soilders could gain fighting experience against enemy's that would be challenging, but it also had other benefits such as the materials gained from killing the monsters and the ability for the monster farm to be used against enemys.
The danger with monster farms was that if the population of the monsters got out of control you were dead, also it could be quite a costly ordeal. Still Gordan was slightly confused as to why they would put a monster farm in such a bad location.
Gordan was a bit disappointed that the kingdom that was supposed to be able to help out the village was doing something so obviously destructive to the relationship between them. Gordan watched as they released about twenty more ants, he marveled at how the horses had been able to make it as long as they had but looking at them more closely he realised that five of the six horses looked almost dead. Gordan was a bit angry at the idiots for doing that to their animals but still he needed to watch a bit longer to see what would happen.
What happened next made Gordan sick, the soilders then came to the last cage which was much larger than the others. After opening up the cage a humungous creature slowly crawled out and slowly looked around. It was the queen, but Gordan couldn't tell why it looked to be in such bad condition before even entering the hill. The ant queen's eyes fell upon the horses at the front of the cart and let out a screech. And suddenly about a hundred ants swarmed out of the hill and began moving toward the horses who were screaming in fear trying to break free of their harnesses.