Chapter 61
For ants, mana aspect depended heavily on environment.
The forest around Redleaf Town should have produced ants with earth-aspect or dark-aspect mana. At most, a few rare variants might carry fire-aspect or rot-poison traits.
Death-aspect?
This was not a graveyard.
The moment Lia spoke, Chalmers grew more anxious than Elise.
"Do you mean they carry traces of death, or that they're actual death-aspect ants?"
"They carry death-aspect mana."
Lia smiled and produced a small vial. Several black ants crawled inside.
She handed it to Elise and explained, "I know this kind of thing better than anyone. They've probably been feeding on the corpses of sentient races for a long time."
Corpses of sentient races.
That was the polite way to put it.
In the Crimsonwood region, these ants could hardly be dining on elves or dwarves with any regularity.
So it had to be human corpses.
But human adventurers who died in the Pyreflame Woods were usually devoured by carnivorous magical beasts or carried home by their companions.
Even if some bodies were left behind in the forest, the ants would have to compete with countless scavengers for them.
How could they have eaten enough to develop traces of death-aspect mana?
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
Elise took the vial and examined the ants with her Spirit.
Sure enough, she sensed an almost imperceptible thread of death-aspect mana inside their bodies.
If she hadn't known what to look for, and if she hadn't searched carefully, she would have missed it entirely.
"Lia, what do you think caused this?" Elise asked.
On this subject, Lia was the expert.
She knew more than a hundred kinds of tiny carrion-eating magical beasts, and several possible explanations sprang to mind at once.
So she began to explain.
"Ants are lifeforms that can be controlled with special potions. In necromancy, there's a spell that lets tiny magical beasts parasitize undead summons.
"Some death-aspect spells also use tiny magical beasts to modify larger creatures. For example, they can be trained to eat specific organs.
"It's also possible to breed huge numbers of tiny magical beasts, then release them under certain conditions to attack a location. If many nests erupted at once, they'd form an ant plague.
"Or someone might be trying to breed high-tier tiny magical beasts. A Second-tier ant doesn't have enough spirituality for a proper contract. But what if it reached Third-tier?"
Breeding magical beasts was nothing unusual in Aurelia.
Especially where death-aspect magic was involved.
Forget ants. Even humans could become materials.
For House Fris, though, this was terrible news.
They had chosen Redleaf Town and were preparing to build their future on it.
Now death-aspect ants had turned up.
That would almost certainly draw direct Church intervention, and the town defense commission might collapse entirely.
For Elise, however, it wasn't necessarily bad.
The Church would likely dispatch Awakened to investigate, but if the commission fell to her, this would become another chance to earn merits.
And she badly needed Church merits.
Potioncraft demanded rare materials, and many of those could only be obtained through the Church's merit exchange.
Now...
"Did you find any magical beasts that prey on the ants?"
"Yes, but very few," Glenrius said. "Predators like Dambos lizards seem to have been deliberately cleared out."
"How wide is the affected area?"
"Straight ahead, we went as far as the cavern where Anarias's lich body appeared last time. It was the same there."
"Then an Awakened is deliberately breeding these tiny magical beasts."
With that exchange, Elise's last shred of optimism died.
Aurelia's wilderness had food chains, the same as any natural world.
Once an ant nest grew past a certain size, it produced winged ants to spread out and found new colonies.
Without predators to check them, the entire forest would eventually be swallowed by ants.
So there should have been natural enemies living around the nests.
That was why Elise had sent Lia and the others into the forest in the first place. She'd needed to know the extent of the Black Root-Borer Ants' territory.
Chalmers, meanwhile, felt his scalp prickle at the words "Anarias's lich body."
By Earth's measure, the cavern Anarias's lich body had dug lay about six miles from Redleaf Town.
Redleaf Town lay another six miles from Crimsonwood.
In other words, across a straight-line stretch of twelve miles, ant predators had gone scarce.
How many nests did that imply?
"Elise..." Chalmers hesitated, then ventured his guess. "We killed Anarias's lich body, and the Church swept this region afterward. Whoever was breeding the nests may have already abandoned the area."
"And if they haven't?" Elise asked.
The sheer size of that area sent a chill crawling up her spine.
Feeding ants on human corpses, then controlling a stretch of land twelve miles across?
That demanded a terrifying amount of "food."
Anyone with a functioning brain could guess there was a dark supply chain behind it.
Lia, however, sided with Chalmers.
"Dambos lizards feed on ants. If someone were still breeding a death-aspect queen here, I wouldn't have found that kind of lizard so easily."
"Maybe they did abandon this place," Elise said. Her expression hardened. "But I'm a High Cleric of the Church of Light, and I have to ask: what if they're feeding magical beasts with living people?"
Silence fell.
Using living people as feed for magical beasts was not unheard of in Aurelia.
But it was generally done only with small or tiny magical beasts. Large ones ate too much, which made such operations easy for the Church to sniff out.
Now that Elise had found signs of a possible dark supply chain, she couldn't look away.
"Elise, will you report this first, or investigate first?" Glenrius asked.
As an elf, he despised this sort of thing too.
"We dig up a few nests first," Elise said. "I want to know whether some sewer rat is really playing games out here."
She and her teammates moved to the large nest nearest Redleaf Logging Camp.
After donning the special protective cloak Chalmers had prepared, Elise began gathering her spell.
Her Second-tier Spirit stood at 39, and she could commit more than 29 points of it to driving her mana.
With her staff in hand, that figure climbed to nearly 38.
With every skill modifier active, the spiritual energy shaping her [Holy Light] reached almost 1,650 units.
Power at that level in hand, Elise closed her eyes, staff raised.
A sphere of radiance formed in the air before the nest, bright enough to sting the eye.
The great ball of light sank slowly into the colony, which had already been draped with a wide net.
Only then did Elise guide the spell, letting light-aspect mana wash through every living creature that carried spirituality.
[Holy Light Skill EXP +17,462.]
The system message appeared.
More than seventeen thousand this time. Elise was well pleased.
Better still, her control over the spell was growing smoother.
At the Senior Second-tier level, this [Holy Light] would be hard to match.
The primary function of [Holy Light] was soothing.
When it settled into the nest, the ants didn't scatter. Instead, they turned strangely docile.
After Elise finished casting and downed the Spirit Potion she'd prepared, Chalmers led House Fris's retainers forward to begin the extermination.
They poured flammable magical materials into the nest, readied wide nets to intercept the winged ants, then broke the colony open and set to clearing out the tiny creatures.
A black tide of ants poured out from beneath the stump.
A small fraction had wings. These spread them and lifted into the sky, seeking somewhere to land and carry on the colony.
Most of the workers and soldiers boiled out in every direction like mad things. The instant they sensed anything alive, they swarmed toward it, trusting in sheer numbers.
Against ordinary magical beasts—even large ones like bears, tigers, or leopards—an ant nest fighting with everything it had could inflict brutal damage.
Human Awakened were different.
They used tools.
The protective cloaks sealed the entire body, and even the breathable sections were woven from special alchemical materials.
Tiny magical beasts couldn't harm a properly prepared human Awakened.
Once Chalmers and the others had cleared most of the Black Root-Borer Ants, Elise would normally have led them off to track the survivors carrying her mana signature.
But the news Lia had brought changed the priority.
They had to dig the nest open and find the source of the death-aspect mana.
Everyone bent to the excavation.
The nest ran more than fifty feet deep, and the knight apprentices were soaked in sweat by the time they got far enough down. In the end, even Chalmers and Harkian pitched in to finish the job quickly.
When the nest was finally opened, the Second-tier queen was captured alive, as expected.
They also found several pieces of human tissue deep inside the colony, not yet fully decayed.
The air turned heavy again.
Human tissue inside the nest meant someone truly was breeding these tiny magical beasts.
And after Anarias's lich body revived, he had chosen utter depravity—colluding with a certain mercenary company in much the same fashion.
Were the two incidents connected?