CHAPTER 789: ANTS AND DUNGEON (2)

By forcing the dungeon to reject you physically, Rodion went on,

Mikhailis’s ribs throbbed in agreement.

He remembered that impact clearly—the way the golem’s shockwave had slammed into him, the breath tearing from his lungs, the feeling of flying backward with no control over his body.

So that’s what my internal organs bought us, he thought dryly. Good to know someone got value out of it.

"Rodion?" Elowen’s voice pulled him back again.

She wasn’t looking at the table anymore.

She was looking at him, really looking—searching his expression, tracing every small shift in his eyes.

"Mikhailis?" she corrected softly, when she realised she had said the AI’s name in her head instead of out loud. "What exactly... worked?"

There was something fragile under the question.

Hope, maybe.

Fear of hope.

He rubbed his forehead with two fingers, as if he could smooth his thoughts into a simpler shape.

"Rodion," he murmured under his breath, just loud enough that Elowen might catch the name, everyone else probably assuming it was just him talking to himself again, "shut up for a moment and explain the important part."

There was a brief pause in his head that somehow felt offended.

The important part, Rodion said, each syllable overly prim, is that the infiltration is stable. Anchor hollows are secured. Mapping has begun. The dungeon has been... compromised.

Mikhailis let his hand fall back to his knee.

He looked at the others.

"That," he said aloud, "is the important part."

A small silence followed.

Serelith’s eyes gleamed, pupils dilating a little.

"Inside," she repeated slowly, tasting the word. "Meaning... we can see?"

There it was—the hunger of a scholar faced with something new and forbidden. She wasn’t thinking of safety, or borders, or politics. She was thinking of patterns, runes, equations written in stone and blood.

Mikhailis flexed his right hand.

Thin lines of ink-dark rune work glimmered faintly where they were sewn into the leather glove, following the paths of veins and bones.

"We can," he said. "If I open the channel."

The lamps around them seemed to dim for a heartbeat, though he knew they didn’t. It was just everyone’s attention tightening, pulling inward.

Under the table, Elowen’s hand shifted.

Her fingers brushed the back of his wrist, feather-light, then stayed there, her touch a quiet anchor.

He didn’t pull away.

You sure? he thought, not with words this time, but with the small tilt of his head toward her, with the question in his gaze.

She understood anyway.

Her golden eyes met his, steady despite the faint shadows of tiredness beneath them.

"Show us," she said quietly.

No command in her voice now.

Just trust.

He exhaled, feeling his chest tighten around it, then nodded once.

"Rodion," he thought, focusing on the familiar presence in his mind. "Project the feed. External view only. Filter anything too... obvious."

He felt the AI’s faint electronic sigh.

Always censoring my art, Rodion complained. Very well. Channeling now. Keep your hand steady. Try not to pass out. It would ruin the image quality.

Mikhailis ignored that last part and lifted his hand above the table, palm turned up.

Light began to form at his fingertips.

It started as a faint glow, just enough to make the air around his hand shimmer. Then the runes stitched into the glove lit one by one, like small stars waking up, their lines connecting in thin arcs that spiraled outward. The glow spread into the air, drawing a loose rectangle that looked like someone had traced the edges of a window with light.

The space inside that outline rippled, the way hot air blurs the view above a fire.

Slowly, it solidified into a floating pane of pale blue light.

The tent went completely silent.

Even the kettle at the side stopped its faint bubbling, or maybe someone had taken it off the heat—Mikhailis didn’t look to check. The only sounds left were breathing and the soft sigh of canvas shifting in the wind outside.

At first, the image on the pane was tight and confined—a view from inside a crack no wider than his thumb.

Stone pressed close on both sides, dark and rough, tiny grains jutting like teeth. The space was so small that the edges of the vision blurred where the scout’s body brushed the walls. Ahead, the micro-tunnel opened into a slightly wider hollow, just big enough for something small and determined to squeeze through.

Shadows moved in that narrow space.

Small forms crawled along the surfaces, sometimes upside down, sometimes sideways, slipping in and out of gaps with an ease that made them look more like flowing liquid than separate creatures. The projection blurred their exact shapes on purpose, smoothing out certain details, making them seem more like clusters of moving shadow than clear bodies.

Mikhailis felt them, not only with his eyes, but with that quiet pressure at the back of his mind.

Each presence was a small pulse.

A soft I am here on a web only he could feel.

Good, he thought, watching the way they moved. They’re holding formation. No unnecessary wandering. No heroics. Just work.

The scout whose sight they were using squeezed fully through the crack.

The hollow beyond was like a pocket between layers of stone, an air bubble trapped in the dungeon’s body. The walls weren’t flat; they curved slightly, like the inside of a ribcage. Thin lines of pale light ran through them, branching in patterns that looked disturbingly similar to veins.

With every few heartbeats, the light brightened as a mana pulse surged through, then faded again.

Serelith inhaled softly.

"It’s... alive," she whispered, honest awe in her voice.

On the projection, the stone shivered when the pulse passed, dust lifting and resettling as if the dungeon had exhaled.

Vyrelda muttered under her breath, voice low and rough. "No wonder so many die trying to enter," she said. "They’re walking into a creature, not a structure."

The viewpoint shifted again as the scout crawled forward, following a faint glowing line along the ground. The projection highlighted it for the audience—a thin trace of light that looked like chalk marks but moved like smoke.

Behind the scout, more shadows came into view.

They moved in organised lines, splitting and rejoining, their paths crossing in a pattern that looked random at first glance, but revealed a strange order the longer you watched.

Mikhailis narrowed his eyes.

"Rodion," he thought, "give me a little more clarity on the leader."

Adjusting, Rodion replied.

The projection adapted.

The outline of the front-most shadow sharpened, just enough to show its bulk. A heavy, scarab-like shape, back covered in overlapping plates, legs thicker than the others, tipped with digging claws. It radiated quiet purpose, the way a captain radiates command without needing to shout.

One of the Scurabons.

Elowen’s fingers tightened around his wrist now, not accidentally, not lightly.

"And that one?" she asked, voice still quiet, but steady. "The large one at the front."

"Burrow captain," he said. "They... know how to open space without collapsing the entire ceiling on themselves."

He could have said more.

He could have explained how many tunnels the Scurabons had carved under Silvarion already, how many times their careful sense for pressure and weight had saved worker lines from being crushed.

But that would have meant stepping closer to the truth—closer to saying the word ant out loud around people who were not supposed to know.

So he stopped there.

Lira’s gaze was glued to the light pane.

Her usually calm eyes were wide now, dark irises reflecting the pale blue of the projection. She watched the way the shadows branched out, splitting, merging, spreading like ink in water.

For a moment, she forgot to look polite.

She leaned forward just a little.

"Wait," she murmured. "How did your... scouts know where to go? How did they find your position to start from? The paths..." She hesitated, searching for the word. "They feel like they’re... converging."

Mikhailis felt her question touch something deep in him.

Not the magic.

The responsibility.

He shrugged, shoulders moving carefully so as not to pull on his bruised ribs, lips quirking into a half-grin that was too tired to be smug, but honest enough to be real.

"They always know where I am," he said. "Hive-link."

Cerys’s brow furrowed, a small line appearing between her eyebrows.

"Hive...?" she echoed, unfamiliar with the term in this context, suspicion and curiosity tangled together.

He lifted his other hand in a small, dismissive gesture, as if batting away a fly.