Rui wasn't afraid that the ants that were spotted would go back and report to the queen ant. The ants did not possess such a sophisticated system in place. He observed that despite being monsterified and growing larger, they had not gained much, if any intelligence, at all.
"Right… Left… Straight," Rui murmured as they sped through the contorting tunnels of the Shionel Dungeon.
Rui couldn't help but sigh at the tendency of the ants to construct a dizzying maze as opposed to just making straight paths from the outside to the core. That would make their job so much easier and reduce the risks by a lot.
Still, Rui was quite confident. He had constructed extensive predictive models on the ants from the very moment he detected the cavity at the center of the ant mountain with the stash of esoteric ore deposits. Even if the ants were hilariously simplistic, he was not going to hold back out of some sense of arrogance.
This helped as he quickly extrapolated the future movements of all the ants within his sensory vision. Avoiding ants that fell from the ceiling of the tunnel out of nowhere, or even being forced to kill them with the Bellhorn blade and Pipe that he had at hand to use at any moment.
"We're close, you doing fine?" Rui asked, glancing at Kane.
"Great," Kane replied simply, focusing on making sure the technique was flawless. It was a mental technique, and when he concentrated on it fully, he couldn't dedicate much of his attention to anything else, including conversation.
"It's just up ahead," Rui narrowed his eyes as they approached the giant queen ant, getting closer and closer. Rui had a feeling she was different from the rest of the mindless ants, just based purely on her movements alone.
Soon enough, they entered the center of the ant mountain.
The giant queen ant was just up ahead of them, menacingly looming over the entire cavity.
Rui and Kane immediately felt a sense of threat emanating from the giant insect. Rui sensed that even with his Bellhorn Sword and hot air pipe, killing the queen bee would be extremely difficult. Primordial Instinct warned him not to go anywhere near the creature.
There was a great amount of power hidden within her frame, without a doubt, but more than anything, it was her eyes that inspired fear.
They were a grotesque fusion of insect eyes and mammalian eyes. Each of the little hexagons on her ant eyes was a mammalian eye with a sharp pupil at the center. It was an unholy fusion of the two, and Rui wasn't even sure how she came to develop such eyes.
For a second, he was afraid that her vision was sharp enough to spot them despite Void Step, which would be a disaster, but luckily Kane and his technique held strong as she didn't so much as bat an eye, or eyes, at them.
Rui was still extremely wary, however, just one look at her eyes and he could tell that the creature was intelligent. Each of her motions had a purpose, whether it was to adjust the many eggs behind her through which the silhouette of partially formed ant larvae could be seen, or to consume more food, she most certainly was not a mindless insect like her offspring were.
"Let's get this finished as soon as possible,"
Rui and Kane immediately dove into the treasure trove, before quickly storing esoteric ore deposits into his dimensional storage ring at a quick pace. He did not want to spend any more time here than he needed to.
The best part of the Void Step technique was that it obscured objects with the domain of Kane's technique's influence, meaning as long as Kane and Rui were interacting with the esoteric ore deposits that they stole, it would not be noticed barring extreme cases.
However, it would not be noticed directly, that did not mean it could not be noticed indirectly. Eventually, the stockpile's size decreased greatly, and no amount of misdirection would be able to prevent the queen from noticing that. Thus, the two of them worked quicker.
The best part was that the esoteric ore deposits were already extracted, they were simply tossed into a huge pile of other glowing rocks and biological matter.
Thus Rui was able to store them at an incredible pace. It wasn't long before the two of them come close to reaching the quota of the stockpile that they had.
Unfortunately, before they quite finished. The ant queen who had been quite busy with the birthing process immediately realized something as gravely wrong when she turned to the stockpile to gather more servings of nourishment.
Its many eyes ran back and forth across the entire cavity, getting closer to the stockpile to sense it clearly, due to the sensory jamming effect that hampered her senses from perceiving the fact that huge portion of the stockpile were empty.
"KIEEEEEEEEERKH!" It released a deafening screech, producing a titanically powerful shockwave released from just its alone!
"Argh!" Rui and Kane grimaced as the two of them immediately shot out of the room, being hit by a powerful Squire-level shockwave, causing the entire ant-mountain to tremble!
Thankfully, Kane had prepared himself for this ever since this exact same thing had happened on the sixteenth floor with the trigger-happy grade-ten Martial Squire hitting them with a wide-area long-range wind attack.
This time, he didn't falter, due to having made changes to his mindset to be able to handle such a thing, and also because of the fact that he was at his absolute peak. He would not have been able to maintain his technique under such circumstances if not for these two factors.
The two of them shot through the increasingly dense tunnels of the ant mountains as a surge of ants running towards the queen's distress call began clogging the tunnels.
There were so many ants that if they stopped for even a moment, causing the technique to forcibly break, they would be dead meat!
