Ackster, drenched in blood and gore of colors he couldn't understand how they could be inside a living being, crawled out of the ant queen's mouth, fully prepared to engage in a final tussle with the worker ants and their superiors. However, as he exited the ant queen, he slowly lowered his arm as he realized he had nothing to worry about.
The ants of various versions were still in the room, and Ackster could hear more moving about in the tunnels. But it seemed that killing the ant queen had had unexpected consequences for her subordinates.
Some worker ants lay on the ground, lifeless, like puppets with their strings cut. Some were repeatedly running straight into walls. Others were spinning in circles or doing eights on the floor together. All of the ants were a jumbled mess, regardless of their version.
Worker ants, soldier ants, and lieutenant ants were all the same mindless drones with their controller dead. There was not a single sign of intelligence in any of the ants, and none of them paid any heed to Ackster, whom they had been trying to kill with mind-numbing fervor just minutes ago.
Ackster got a hunch he knew what it was about. Ordinary ants, not ones doped up and under the control of what had to be an A-rank queen, didn't lose their minds like this should their queen die. They would go about their business, and a new queen would rise. These ants didn't even look like they knew what a queen was.
He held up his hand to his hair. Mio didn't even need to be told to hand over the hard object Ackster had tried to chew.
With the light of the stones in the ceiling, Ackster could finally identify the object. Well, he could see it more clearly. He used his thumb to rub off some of the blood and brain juice that had somehow remained despite being inside Mio.
'I guess Mio is pretty obedient, then.'
Since Ackster had asked Mio not to eat it, Mio hadn't touched anything of what had gone inside the slime. That Mio had such control over his inside's digesting ability and that the slime listened to him so perfectly were both admirable.
"Thanks, Mio. You've done a good job."
Mio patted Ackster's head in a way that made Ackster feel like Mio was saying it was nothing. He was also pretty sure that Mio encouraged him to get a move on and to give it some food now that the threat of the ants was out of the way.
Ackster was about to give Mio an affirmative answer when he was caught up in studying the purple shine of the object in his hands. He managed to scrub off what had covered it with relative ease and, in doing so, revealed a round marble of what looked like purple glass too opaque to see through.
However, three things told Ackster it wasn't just ordinary purple-colored glass that had managed to find its way inside the ant queen's brain. One, it was too hard. He could bite through glass of that size as long as it wasn't extraordinarily tough.
Two, it wasn't still. When Ackster looked closely and held the eyeball-sized marble up to the lights in the ceiling, he could see the purple color move around slightly like ink.
Three, he knew what it was.
It was a Stone of Wisdom.
"Here, hold onto this for me."
It wasn't what Ackster had expected. The original story had only mentioned an item called a Stone of Wisdom once, and it hadn't gone into detail about what such a stone was or what it could do. The short description the auctioneer had provided before selling the stone was that it was a condensed marble of mana that coincided with the magic properties of a stat that one could unlock with the right tools, materials, or circumstances.
The Stone of Wisdom supposedly had pretty beneficial effects for mages or people who relied on the complex uses of mana, such as magic, healing, alchemy, or anything along those lines. Since it was a lone Stone of Wisdom that appeared, that auctioneer recommended getting an accomplished craftsman or jeweler to turn it into a staff.
The Stone had sold for a decent price in the original story, so Ackster figured that he could sell it for some spare cash if he couldn't find a use for it. While it wouldn't do him any harm to get an item that enhanced his wisdom, the strategy he was planning to rely on was basically on the opposite end of the spectrum. He was using a brawn-over-brain type of method to fight. Where was the wisdom in that?
But Ackster then looked at the stump that remained of his right arm.
"Maybe I do need a little wisdom in my life."
Mio gave Ackster a reassuring and comforting pat as Ackster stayed silent and mulled on the reality that he had lost his limb. And while there were ways to get it back, it would probably take a while until then. He would have to live without an arm for the foreseeable future.
Ackster comforted himself with the fact that it was temporary, and if he hadn't lost his arm, he would have died. But he didn't forget the fact that if he had been stronger, faster, and better, he wouldn't have lost it. He had no one to blame but himself.
So, Ackster pushed aside his feelings of loss and regret and got up.
He had killed the queen and the general, which had solved one of his problems. But he was still inside the ant nest. Thankfully, since the tunnels were littered with uncountable disconnected ants, Ackster wouldn't starve for the foreseeable future.
But if he couldn't find his way out, Ackster would be stuck underground, buried alive but not trapped. He would starve to death. After losing an arm in a fight for his survival, it definitely wasn't the way he wanted to go.
Ackster looked around the queen's chamber.
It was just that he had no idea which of the dozens of tunnels connected to the chamber led to the surface. It was even possible that none of them did since they split up the further they went.
Ackster also hadn't seen any tunnels in the ground when he and Karandiel first entered the minefield of ants hidden by the tall grass. So, the entrances to the nest were most likely temporary and only opened when the ants hunted their prey.
Ackster yet again found himself in a sticky situation.