The group had spent a lot of time on the hike, talking about this.

  It started, completely unexpectedly, with an apology from Effluvia. "It's the nature of Mages," she said, "to want to be conservative and ensure they have something to contribute later in the battle. Survival instinct, maybe. But I was following Sterling's example. I went to my aunt and I asked her how I could be more helpful to the group, and told her what I've been doing to this point. She said that if this is the way that I want to fight, then I need to start doing push-ups."

  Earnest snorted. Effluvia explained that her aunt had explained to her that fighting one-on-one was the province of ‘big, brawny brutes like the Rathers.’ as ‘Mages fight with their minds,’ but I'm treating my power like a big pointy stick. So, I've been doing some practicing, and I think I've got the basic workings of a plan.”

  Dalliance hadn't been able to contribute very much to this portion. Odd names had been thrown around, apparently impressive military tactical names referencing books that both noble scions had read, and spells she’d been frustrated she couldn’t use on the crow. If anything, it made him feel vaguely better that Charity didn't have any idea what they were talking about either.

  Fallowfield and Earnest flanked Sterling, doing exactly the same thing as Circe and Charity for Effluvia: protecting the high-value target. Casting the firewall had drained almost all of Sterling's mana and left his sword glowing like an ember, but with a mallet in his other hand, the knight’s son showed he wasn’t going to be resting on any laurels.

  Woebegone had brought his stupidly big club instead of a mallet. Earnest said it was because he’d gone to the trouble of putting spikes in it and probably didn’t want to waste the money. Dalliance supposed that if he had gone to all that trouble, perhaps he wouldn’t want to part with it either, but he didn’t think the choice of weapon matched the choice of opponent very well.

  As for Dalliance: with the Council, he had discussed what contributions he could make, and come to a simple conclusion: there was no special advantage here. They were all equal against the scuttling horde of ants. Which, he suspected, might be the point. Show willing. Walk up to the ants and get bitten. Show them you’re capable.

  Dalliance took a position next to Earnest and waited.

  The queen's first move was a charge. Hundreds of ants swept around the perimeter, anti-clockwise, even as the ants already positioned on the uncovered left flank moved forward.

  Effluvia held up both hands. Coruscating arcs of argent and violet snapped up from the ground, more deafening than the voltaic arcs overhead. The lightning was brighter and broader, thick in places and branching out. Thousands of ants died, their carapaces flash-boiling as vapors and foul smokes rose in a cloud. As the torrent ended, she stumbled, and Charity helped her back.

  Sterling stepped forward. It was the knight's turn. He raised his sword, and fire followed as he drew a line from the edge of the battlefield across the face of the ant mound itself, repeating the word of power for his sword again and again. He cut off the field of corpses from the areas that still had ants, creating, in effect, a safe zone—one they would pay dearly to enter. The line of fire curved and began to approach the boundary again, a bottleneck through which every ant would have to come. He chanted the command word over and over, as fire lashed out at the right flank of the ants, sticking to sand and insects alike, drawing a wall of flame that would last for a little while. Effluvia had promised to target the magic-consuming flames, refreshing them with her own magic when they looked about to falter, to keep one flank secure.

  As if in response, they came boiling out of the mound, an angry swarm of red and black carapaced creatures, and the children went to work. Mallets meant for splitting stone caved in carapaces, ichor fountaining or else splattering, wetting knees and ankles. For every two they killed, one got through, landed a bite somewhere on someone, before being thrown to the floor and smashed.

  The hard-packed dirt ground was soon pitted and, in some places, gouged. Woebegone swung his stupid club, scattering ants left and right but not killing any, and the swarm began to advance.

  And then Effie stepped forward again. It was the plan: bunch them up, burn them out. This time her lightning traveled further into the field; she hadn't said she expected them to gain ground this fast.

  The stench, the smell . . . Dalliance thought he would wear it for days.

  The experience gain was also not quite what he'd been hoping for:

  [You have gained one percent of one (0.01) experience point for the extermination of an ant drone. According to the struggle is the return.]

  But the worst thing was the commentary: amplified for the audience to be able to hear one another, it also drowned out the action on the field.

  "That was proper tactics," said Effluvia's aunt. Dalliance thought. He couldn't be sure, having never met the woman, but he’d seen her pick up Effluvia before, and the two seemed distant in both age and manner. "Bunched them up, wiped them out, and controlled the approach vectors.”

  “These are twelve-year-olds, Sage.” Missus Best, standing up for them?

  “Twelve-year-olds who have been reading the old classics. Tacitus, Valoris Kade. I hope you didn't expect them to run into the jaws of defeat without as much as a plan."

  Cadence’s gravelly voice cut in. "I did, their age. And I dug the queen out with my hands. And I ate her."

  "And yet you did not merit a knighthood," said the aristocratic woman, her voice cold as the void. “Shocking.”

  The fight began with their big area-denial options, but not everyone was effective. Circe’s ring of breaking could certainly kill an ant, but it could just as easily miss and hurt someone else. Dalliance had heard the plan, and he wasn't discounting his friends’ advice, exactly. But what if they were wrong? His eyes flicked from point to point, [Prediction] blazing behind his vision, a cloud of possible futures coalesced into a carpet of ants. There was no telling where any one ant would be without focusing on it individually, to the exclusion of the rest of the swarm. This was the worst possible place for his power.

  And yet, when he engaged [Deflection] in concert with his [Prediction], he could see that it did work. The ants had almost no will; they were feather-light to redirect. In fact, a whole group of them could be redirected with every effort he undertook.

  With nothing better to do, he began redirecting the swarms targeting Effluvia and Sterling, all while smacking at the ones in front of him with his mallet. And little by little, the pressure on the battlefield began to grow to a pressure behind his eyes, a stress on the back of his neck.

  When the next ant he tried to [Deflect] rebounded his skill on him instead, he was shocked.

  The Queen.

  “The Queen has taken the field,” intoned Mister Best. “Her soldiers will no longer be uncoordinated. Consider your exit strategies. Conserve a little energy for retreat while you can.”

  Sir Vigilance Worth’s chair snapped as he leaned back contemplatively, his hand bracing against the floor before he so much as dipped downward. The knight stood, considered the wreckage of his chair for a moment, and walked to the edge of the effect surrounding the ant-hill. “Pleasant,” he said, “How goes it?”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “I’m game to run this all night, though I doubt I shall have to.”

  Vigilance didn’t think so either.

  The ant flood turned vicious. Where before they had bitten and stung anything in sight, and Dalliance had done his best to redirect them away from Effluvia, now any ant he targeted with [Deflection] burned through his skill. The Queen seemed to have a bottomless supply of whatever esoteric energy runs social skills.

  Dalliance felt small and vulnerable. Nothing he did mattered. He was a bit player on a field of thousands. He had come from nothing, and he would become nothing. All who remembered this field would remember the Queen; her power was unbreakable, her control of her troops unshakable. And he was less than nothing, a worm to be torn up and eaten by ants.

  He barely realized it when his arms began to droop, and the ants, which had always been rushing him, began to scuttle faster, like spiders: predatory and hungry.

  “Bloody nobles,” said Cadence. The words fell like lead weights would if dropped at the feet of one’s social superior, who then had to decide whether picking them up would be dignified.

  Lord Worth twiddled his mustache and smiled instead. “The ant [Queen], you mean? Detestible creature. Still, the reknown in such a kill . . . .“Pity you had to go ‘[Farmer]’ on me. We’d have had rare times on the hunt, and perhaps you'd feel differently. Did I tell you about the sixteen-point buck?”

  The ladies in the gallery sighed despondently, as one.

  The kids fought, trying to prevent one another from dying, trying to get one another out. The ants were nearly mindless, but the queen was not.

  Dalliance was vaguely aware of Mister Best’s arguments that the children were unprepared, that they should be allowed to quit the field.

  He was outvoted.

  Feel the love, Dalliance thought savagely, as his Da dismissed the idea out of hand.

  Parsimony Pleasant then regretfully acknowledged that, without the consent of the parents, they could not end the demonstration.

  As if the parents were allowed to object to the Hunts. Exception or no, nobody spoke up. Even Mister Best held his peace, and something about that made Dalliance mad.

  The ants, which had been moving forward uniformly, began to circle in their swarms like cyclones, half swirling left, half right, swarming the group from ahead and behind.

  Circe was the first one to go down, glowing with her healing magic but overwhelmed. Dalliance heard the sharp retort as her own enchanted item went off, and a spray of ants was reduced to shrapnel and goo, but it didn't make a difference.

  There she was. Faintly purple instead of the normal red and black, and moving erratically. But every time his prediction fell over her, he entered a contest with her will and felt his own power draining away. There could be no mistaking it.

  "Effluvia!" he screamed. "The Queen is to your left, on the inner half of the field!"

  She hesitated, clearly weighing whatever doubt she had against his track record and the knowledge that he could see the future. Her power lashed out and blasted the field, turning sand to glass, but a rank of ants rose up to block the shot, falling in burning ruin.

  "She has to be there!" yelled Sterling, getting excited.

  But Dalliance watched as she moved. Just one of thousands on the field, her shape similar to the rest, only her coloring revealing her true nature.

  "She isn't!" he yelled. "Not anymore!"

  And flying ants descended on them. He supposed she'd been keeping that ability in reserve.

  And Effluvia fell.

  Sterling turned his sword to point to the same area she had fired upon.

  "She's not there!" Dalliance shouted as the kids began falling back.

  His head was swimming, his teeth chattering, his knees weak. His body stung from what must have been dozens of bites.

  Sterling fought to get Effluvia to the edge of the field, but was mobbed. Earnest fell, then Immaculate, staggering past the edge of the field with Effluvia’s collar in one clenched fist and Earnest’s in the other.

  They were dropping like flies.

  "We must end this bout!" Mister Best declared.

  Cadence laughed. "This is the whole purpose: peril. Are you going to invalidate all the suffering that has already happened and deny our children their rewards for their valor?"

  “As if their death would not?” demanded Mister Best.

  Parsimony ignored them.

  "Look!" Dalliance yelled over the fighting. "You don't know where to point! Maybe you don't believe me, but if you're firing randomly anyway—"

  Sterling looked him full in the face for a moment. Despite the ants crawling over him and biting his enhanced skin, the boy was probably the closest of them to being impervious. Even so, Dalliance could see them drawing blood with every bite.

  "I hope you're right," he growled.

  Dalliance didn't bother to comment. He grabbed the boy's wrist and raised it, pointing.

  The Queen didn't have time for more than extending her own wings. She and the ants for ten feet in every direction around her were consumed by the fire.

  [For your part in the slaying of the Ant Queen, you have been granted six (6) points! Meditate upon leadership, and its limitations: a Queen is not her army.]

  Yes. There were still a lot of ants.

  The stink of burned ant was all he could smell. The lightning overhead was all he could clearly see; the rest was a blurry, spinning mess of impressions. Dalliance was a dead weight half-draped across Sterling’s armored arm, his legs little more than jelly. Sterling was nearly at his own limits, taking great whooping breaths, his face a rictus of pain, his steps stumbling towards the shimmering wall of the field at the arena’s edge.

  Mister Best’s amplified voice was calling encouragement from the stands, but the words were just noise without meaning now, drowned out by the hammering in Dalliance’s ears and the chattering of his teeth.

  They were almost there. Ten feet.

  A flying ant landed on Dalliance’s cheek. He ripped it off.

  Five.

  Dalliance’s knees gave out without him telling them they could. The impact sent a fresh wave of agony through his mangled body. The cold, ichor from the ground squelched under his splayed hands as he caught himself and tried to rise again.

  A tide of chittering, black-red bodies, converged on his fallen form. The rustle of their thousand legs on the sand filled his ears.

  Sterling stopped. The boy was about to step back. Dalliance saw the shift in his stance and the regret in his eyes. The knight’s son was going to try and help him. Dalliance had time to wonder if it was because his father was watching.

  In that instant, with the world narrowing to a pinprick, Dalliance’s mind went dead calm. He didn’t need [Prediction] to see what would happen next, though he had it. A dozen futures, where Sterling hesitated, leaving them both dead, pulled down and torn apart just inches from the finish line.

  But there was an audience. Sir Vigilance Worth was watching. Parsimony Pleasant was watching. His own father was watching.

  He gathered the last dregs of his strength and kicked from where he lay on his back, as the knight’s son turned. His foot caught Sterling in the groin with everything he had left in him, and he shoved Sterling across the line, to safety.

  The swarm descended on Dalliance. His vision began to grey out at the edges, the sounds of the world fading into the ringing in his ears.

  Before the darkness took him completely, a line of cold text burned itself into his fading vision, stark against the chaos.

  [For your valorous actions upon the field of troubles, receive your reward: seven (7) experience, and a title: Rearguard. To those who can stand their ground, bravery will be its own reward.]

  Like I'd do that again.