Volume 9 / Chapter 235

TL: LightCafe

Editor: Hungry Panda

Cha Jun Sung arrived at his destination and folded his wings.

He plummeted hundreds of meters to the ground, the ground cracked and a crater formed. It was an impactful entrance.

He is on a large mountain between several small cities.

The mountain is surrounded by the small cities, so it is a location in which it is naturally easy to get surrounded.

Is this why he was being watched by the mutants?

“I’m here.”

A level 8 roar that could not be the result of a living organism’s vocal chords, resounding like several loud speakers combined, swept through the cities and mountain.

Mutants experienced a phenomenon of mental decay and stopped what they were doing, trembling in fear.

There are no level 7s nearby. The strongest mutant is level 6.

An unimaginable gap.

They all looked up.

The Bomb Ants detected the arrival of a top predator and dug deep into their caves, hiding without any movement.

Cha Jun Sung’s body grows smaller.

He became the size of his body when he is a human. He is going to go into the ant hill.

He can’t go in with his normal form because the hole is small.

Cha Jun Sung roared again. He did it inside the ant hill this time, so the effect was amplified and spread to all corners.

The terrain is complicated.

The scale of the cave is impressive. There must be hundreds or even thousands of rooms. It is fitting for the habits of ants.

When Cha Jun Sung went around the ant hill freely, the Bomb Ants began to weakly express their hostility. They seem like they might attack at any moment.

“Queen, Queen Bomb Ant.”

Cha Jun Sung passes food warehouses and hatcheries where they breed disgusting larva and newborn Bomb Ants.

The places are repeated, so he is getting confused as to whether he has already been somewhere or not. He didn’t care however, because it was fairly interesting.

He kept searching, and half a day passed after he entered the cave. There are still a lot of places he needs to look, but he is getting used to it.

“Huh?”

Bang!

He didn’t have a chance to even react. A Bomb Ant approached him on the wall, stuck to Cha Jun Sung’s back, and exploded. The gunpowder is different. It is smoky and smells bloody. The smell of ammonia is accompanied by a shockwave, and a sharply fragmented hard shell and bones fly as debris.

That was the beginning.

Bang bang bang!

One time is hard, two is easy. The Bomb Ants saw their comrade’s intense self-destruction, and jumped in one after the other. It was just like bombing.

Cha Jun Sung inflated his coat thickly in the midst of the exploding ant hill. The Bomb Ants’ explosive power is pounding on his entire body.

‘Pretty good.’

There was no big hit. But there is a reaction from his coat when this is repeated hundreds of times.

Each Bomb Ant’s ability is barely middle level 3. Their self-destruction and distinctive characteristic of swarming together makes them level 4.

“They block it desperately. Always making it so obvious.”

Cha Jun Sung didn’t get overwhelmed by the explosions, and went forward. If they need to fight, even lower levels will attack an upper level. The Queen must be nearby. He is sure that they are sacrificing themselves and self-destructing in order to protect their precious Queen.

“I can’t... see.”

Boom boom boom!

Cha Jun Sung’s tail goes up like a snake. Then it became sharp like a needle and penetrated the Bomb Ants jumping at him.

They became skewered on the tail.

His tail went back down and Bomb Ants littered the floor.

Immediate death without the chance for them to explode. He killed a fair number, but that many more showed up.

The hole in the cave grows larger.

As that happens, the attacks lessen.

How much have they dug in?

A public space as large as a gym appears. At the center, there is the Queen Bomb Ant the size of a house, with dozens of level 5 Bomb Ants. They are all looking at the same thing. Cha Jun Sung.

“It feels like I’m facing a few apartment buildings.”

The public space must be connected to every path in the cave, because there are hundreds of holes. Bomb Ants pour out of them.

“Follow me. You’ll have to take a big sacrifice, but I’ll help you revive your tribe. You could take over this entire area.”

He is speaking in human language, but he didn’t attempt a conversation. They will know by instinct why he has come into the ant hull.

The Queen makes a movement toward Cha Jun Sung. It translates to, ‘Everyone attack.’

Thousands of Bomb Ants jump out of the holes in the wall. They overlap with each other, making it look like a wave.

“The Queen lays the eggs, right?”

He doesn’t know whether she is a hermaphrodite or if she mates.

He will kill everything that comes at him.

He’ll let the Queen and the few level 5s live.

Bomb Ants have a high reproduction rate and speed, so one can become a hundred within a day as long as there are no obstacles in the vicinity.

If they confirm his strength with their eyes rather than their instinct, they will know. There’s no need for him to make the effort to explain.

***

The battle ended in less than an hour. Of course, Cha Jun Sung is the winner.

The Queen didn’t declare her surrender until Bombs Ants were no longer jumping out of the walls and the only troops she had were in the public space.

Cha Jun Sung had counted the Bombs Ants while he was fighting them. Actually, Odin did it for him.

Since it was through artificial intelligence, it calculated the number of Bomb Ants that Cha Jun Sung killed with a margin of error at a little over 10,000.

This is less than they had expected, but this is understandable when considering the other mutants surrounding the mountain that keep the Bomb Ants in check.

As the Bomb Ants are living organisms, they need to eat in order to survive. They need to go out and hunt regardless of the knowledge that the environment is disadvantageous to them.

The mutants maintained balance by killing the Bomb Ants that come out to hunt. That is why the Bomb Ants kept dying and being born. The cycle of the ecosystem made it impossible for them to expand their power.

“Odin. Where’s the closest city?”

[There is a small city 4km west of this place.]

He is going to flip a nearby city and provide the Bomb Ants with food. Once their numbers increase, he will direct their attention elsewhere.

They need to take over nearby areas in order to take on Tyrant and the Rage guild.

“I’m a farmer! I need to lay the seeds if I want to harvest. Alright. Shall we go scatter the seeds?”

Cha Jun Sung leaves the ant hill.

***

Cha Jun Sung arrives in a small city with an estimated population of 50,000 to 60,000. But that doesn’t mean that many mutants are living here.

He doesn’t know what the laws are.

Their law is disorder. They dislike area overlap since birth, so the land and population are inversely proportional.

There are just a couple thousand mutants living in the small city.

Of the cities near the mountain, this is considered one of the lower ranks.

Cha Jun Sung swept the outside first. He attacked the vital spots. He wrapped up dozens of the corpses with his tail and took them back to the ant hill.

He did this multiple times and delivered his simple message to the Queen. She understood because she has basic intellect as a level 6.

After that, hundreds of Bomb Ants followed Cha Jun Sung around.

Battles were left to Cha Jun Sung. The Bomb Ants watched and then moved the corpses back to the ant hill.

They are porters, not soldiers.

There was no damage and the acquirement of food went smoothly, so their numbers increased quickly. After a month, they recovered from the damage that Cha Jun Sung incurred.

The small cities that he used as hunting grounds became ghost towns where nothing was living, whether they be humans or mutants.

Nearby cities disappeared one by one.

As that happened, the Bomb Ants grew stronger.

When they swallowed the 4th city, their numbers exceeded 50,000.

“No more. We can’t go beyond this.”

Queen Bomb Ant speaks to Cha Jun Sung.

Cha Jun Sung rejected her, saying he wants more mutants and he wants a stronger power.

A 50,000 head count is difficult even for mutants living in groups.

Checks start to come in if the number grows too high.

Queen Bomb Ant succeeded in populating the local area without much difficulty thanks to Cha Jun Sung. That is why their ambitions aligned.

She wanted to have a larger territory than she had now.

But Cha Jun Sung knows.

There is no end to greed. It is a definite that there is no end to giving aid.

‘The bigger problem is that she’s resisting my dominion.’

The Queen Bomb Ant was forgetting how she gained such power and was starting to get arrogant.

If she becomes more confident, she might rebel.

So he’s against helping them obtain more power.

Pressure from an upper level to a lower level, from a predator to prey for dominance isn’t like brainwashing. It is making them surrender by force.

[I’m stronger than you, so obey me. If you don’t, I’ll kill you.]

There is only one result if the prey surpasses or challenges the predator in dissatisfaction with its own strength or influence.

‘She’ll probably use the power she created with my help against me.’

No chance.

Why did he raise the Bomb Ants? He didn’t do it for someone else’s benefit. He did it for himself. He can’t leave the situation to lose control.

Cha Jun Sung ignored the Queen Bomb Ant.

He wanted to just kill her, but all of his efforts would become for nought.

Cha Jun Sung became dominant over Queen Bomb Ant with force, but Queen Bomb Ant was born a queen. She has the support of the Bomb Ants.

If their pillar dies, their social structure will be destroyed. That is why he can’t just kill her because he wants to.

‘Cunning bitch.’

She is watching his psychological state.

She is testing his patience and seeing how much she can go against him and how much he will forgive.

It has only been a month since they met, but the Queen Bomb Ant has developed. She is evolving little by little. The force she rules has gone from 10,000 to 50,000.

There has been mental growth in maintaining an expanding military force.

Odin said that the phenomenon seems to be that her mental capacity is growing as she gains responsibilities. It hasn’t been proven scientifically.

They do not know exactly how mutants evolve. But they do know one thing. A high level mutant develops as the number of mutants they dominate increases.

‘I’ll have to kill her once this is over.’

He wouldn’t have taken away everything they achieved if she had been decent, but she tests him too much. She’s one to stab him in the back.

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