The ant queen, despite its massive body, was already in front of her general. She looked at her fallen soldier with its head and chest caved in. The ant queen clicked several times before letting out a soft screech.
Somehow, Ackster got the impression of a child losing a beloved toy and that of a mother losing her child.
After crying out, the ant queen looked in Ackster's direction, but after a glance, she returned her gaze to the general's corpse. She lowered her head and shoveled her child's body into her mouth. A rapid series of crunching noises was all it took before the general's corpse was broken to pieces and moved to the ant queen's stomach, where she would turn it into nourishment for future soldiers.
The short antennas wiggled as the queen turned toward Ackster and faced him with her entire hill-like body. Her head alone felt like it was just as large as Ackster. It was mostly an illusion caused by the abdomen towering behind her. But there was no denying that the ant queen, with a maximum height of almost four meters, was big.
Ackster rose right in time for the ant queen to lurch forward and charge at him,
'"Death!'"
Ackster ignored the ant queen's scream the best he could and stood his ground. His legs were intact, so he could run if he wanted to. But the ant queen was too fast and would pinch him between herself and the wall if he tried to.
With the size of the ant queen and how she could cover the room in less than four seconds, Ackster's best bet wasn't to run away. It was to face her head-on and overpower or outmaneuver her using the delicacy his comparatively small frame offered him.
And since he could already hear the rumbling of ants pouring through the tunnels to collapse on Ackster, Ackster didn't have time to run around. He had to end this as quickly as possible.
Ackster raised his arms, and when the queen's mandibles spread and revealed the bloody insides of the queen's mouth, which was like a bottomless abyss, he grabbed them. The prickly and sharp mandibles, curved like crescent moons, threatened to slice through both Ackster's arms and his body.
They dug into the flesh of his palms, and Ackster felt them grind against his bones like a pair of saws. The pain was nothing to scoff at, but Ackster did just that as he grabbed the mandibles with his fingers. He wasn't quite strong enough to pierce his fingers through the tough, abyssal black shell. But he was strong enough to push apart the mandibles and spread them wide. His arms were no longer squeezed to his sides in a desperate effort not to get himself snipped in half.
Ackster wrenched open the ant queen's appendages and stared down her bottomless mouth as he, with a roar, tore them off her. He put a foot on her lower jaw to leverage and reach all the way and get the last pieces of muscle detached from the ant queen's head.
Ackster's body surged with strength as he broke the ant queen's main weapon, the only thing she could possibly use by herself against him. She still had her legs, and while they were powerful enough to break Ackster's ribs, it was only when he was locked in place. And with the ant general, the only being in the nest who could rival his strength, dead, the ant queen had no way to pin Ackster down so her strikes would land.
After screeching in pain as her mandibles dropped to the floor, the ant queen stomped with a wrathful fervor as she tried to extinguish Ackster. But it was futile. Even with the injuries he sustained during the ant queen's sneak attack, which were mainly to his upper body and too light to heavily affect his movements, Ackster dodged the ant queen's movements with ease.
Keen Senses and Battlesight, spurred beyond their limits by Limit Breaker, filled Ackster's mind with flashing images and sensory impressions that constantly alerted him of where not to go.
And once he sneaked under the ant queen, she was at a complete loss. Her feet stomped against the ground like a herd of elephants, inviting dust and rubble from the ceiling. But she was too wide and clumsy to catch Ackster with her inelegant moves. In that position, even if he was afraid of getting flattened, Ackster didn't have any trouble launching strike after strike into the ant queen's underbelly.
The ant queen's exoskeleton and chitin carapace were expectedly hard. But Ackster's strikes were harder. Not to mention how, even if he broke his bones, they would heal. He had no inhibitions as he unleashed more than his full strength with every blow just to crack the ant queen's shell and pave the way to her insides.
When he finally felt that he was making a difference, he heard and felt something join the ant queen in her rampaging stampede. The ants had finally joined her in the room.
The soldier ants were too tall and too useless to try and catch the horrible being causing their queen trouble. The ant lieutenants were the same. The only exceptions were the worker ants, who were small and dumb enough to recklessly charge into the fray of the ant queen's legs. So, they obeyed her instinctual orders and attacked Ackster with all their might, regardless of the queen's legs raining down on and skewering them like morsels of meat.
In the zealous stamping, the worker ants pierced by her legs quickly got torn to pieces and fell off. They didn't hinder the queen in the least. However, both the dead and the living ants became stumbling blocks and hurdles for Ackster, which he had to go around or over while also keeping track of the ant queen's six legs.
It was to the point where Ackster even stopped thinking. His mind knew where the ants were, thanks to his skills. And his body knew what it had to do, so it did its best to navigate through the chaotic situation while also inflicting as much damage as possible on the ant queen.