Armored Ant Nest (2)

Two months had passed since Allen began clearing out the Armored Ant nest, and he still hadn’t managed to conquer the first one he’d attacked.

“Hey, kid, you’ve got some strength!”

“Thank you.”

Allen was currently at a village at the foot of the White Dragon Mountains, where mithril ore was being refined into mithril in a smelting furnace. Construction on the village had begun in April.

He was carrying lumber with the men in what was still a rather bleak-looking village.

He’d set out to exterminate the nest, which was said to hold over a thousand Armored Ants. He’d been killing more than two hundred a day, but even after a month, he still hadn’t wiped them all out. Hunting two days a week for five weeks, he must have killed over two thousand Armored Ants in a month.

And yet they kept appearing. Perhaps there had simply been more than the thousand he’d heard about. The nest might be huge, with three or even five thousand Armored Ants.

It was possible the nest had turned out to be much larger than expected, but one thing bothered him. Nearly two hundred Armored Ants he’d killed would be gone by the time he returned to the nest. Could new Armored Ants be continually produced by feeding on the dead ones? Armored Ants eating Armored Ants, and more of them being born. It was horrifying.

But there was no way he could collect the corpses to keep them from nourishing new Armored Ants. The endless stream of ants made it impossible even to retrieve their magic stones. The experience was better than anything he’d earned from hunting so far, but there was no financial gain at all.

So he talked to the butler. From what the captain of the knights had told him, he’d learned that the household had been accommodating him quite a bit, so he decided to ask, even if it was a long shot...