Suddenly—

  A sharp heat flared inside his mouth, as if a tiny ember had settled upon his tongue.

  Noah froze in place, his vision trembling.

  “Hm…?”

  In the span of a single heartbeat, his eyes widened with a terror deeper than anything he had felt during the battle.

  The heat wasn’t confined to his mouth. It spread like wildfire—sliding down his throat, surging violently into his chest, before plunging deeper into his gut.

  Noah collapsed onto his knees.

  His breathing fell apart as if his lungs had been filled with lead. Both hands clutched at his stomach, fingers digging into his flesh as his face twisted into a mask of raw, distorted pain.

  Something… was terribly wrong.

  He glanced at his trembling hand.

  The veins beneath his skin bulged grotesquely, swollen like small serpents writhing under the surface. Their paths were stained with a horrifying color—a nightmarish blend of pale green and dark violet.

  They pulsed visibly.

  Violently.

  As if his heart were beating through every inch of his body.

  His expression froze.

  Then the memory struck him like a brutal slap.

  “Poison…”

  The word escaped his lips in a broken whisper, barely audible even to himself.

  “I forgot… the ant meat… is poisonous…!”

  In the rush of adrenaline and rapid healing, he had forgotten.

  Their bodies weren’t merely reservoirs of energy.

  They were reservoirs of deadly toxins—venoms far too potent for a human body to neutralize quickly enough.

  Suddenly, his body felt unbearably heavy, as though it had turned to stone.

  His vision wavered, dissolving into a dark, suffocating haze.

  And the fissure…

  It lay right in front of him.

  So close that he could touch it if he simply reached out his hand.

  But his body—

  No longer obeyed him.

  The engine had failed at the very moment he reached the finish line.

  Noah’s body curled inward under the weight of the agony, like a dry leaf shriveling within a fire.

  Violent spasms seized him one after another. His intestines twisted as if crushed within an invisible iron fist, wringing his insides mercilessly.

  Then, with a brutal convulsion, he vomited.

  A bitter, burning liquid spilled onto the ground, staining the stone with a sickly color as his vision shook violently.

  He was dying—his cells screamed that truth without mercy. The poison he had absorbed from the ant flesh had begun to ravage his vital systems.

  But his thoughts were not on death, nor on the agony tearing through his veins.

  His mind was fixed on a single sound growing clearer behind him—

  the pounding footsteps of the mother ant.

  She would reach him. Any second now.

  The dark entrance of the rocky fissure stood directly before him, looming like a gate into the unknown. It was so close, yet that tiny distance stretched before his eyes like a boundless desert.

  He raised his swollen, trembling hand and stared at the veins pulsing beneath his pale skin, glowing with a sickly green hue. His nerves no longer responded. His body had declared mutiny.

  Then—

  Boom!

  He slammed his fist into his stomach with everything he had left.

  Pain exploded through his consciousness like lightning—but it worked. The shock disrupted the paralysis, forcing his numbed nervous system to react.

  He staggered upright onto one leg.

  Boom!

  Another blow to the same spot.

  He shifted onto the other leg as the world went black for a moment before a faint glimmer of light returned.

  “Move…”

  He whispered it to himself like a strict military command.

  The fissure before him was a void of darkness—a black hole in the corridor wall whose depths hid unknown horrors. Perhaps another death. Perhaps even worse monsters.

  But to him now, that darkness was the only hope left.

  Boom!

  Another hard strike to his abdomen.

  For a fleeting moment, the numbness from the shock spread through his body, dulling the venom that was paralyzing his limbs.

  One step.

  He stumbled.

  Boom!

  Another strike.

  Another step.

  The ground felt distant beneath him, as if the air itself had thickened, resisting his advance. Yet with every passing second, the rocky fissure grew larger in his eyes.

  Behind him, the grinding sound drew closer—the scraping of armored limbs against stone, the acidic scent of rage emanating from the mother ant.

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  She was moments away from sinking her jaws into his back.

  Boom!

  The final blow.

  The last surge of will dragged from the depths of his shattered soul.

  He reached his hand into the pitch-black darkness of the fissure—

  and his fingers touched the cold stone within.

  She raised her heavy legs, her joints grinding with a muffled metallic rasp as she crushed the body of a worker that had dared to obstruct her path. She did not hesitate. She did not slow.

  The weak are removed. The path is opened.

  She advanced swiftly, her six legs striking the ground in a lethal rhythm. Ahead of her, the ranks had split apart, a corridor of terror carved by her overwhelming presence. And in the center of that void—

  she saw him.

  The creature.

  Small. Strange. Different.

  He was fleeing, but his movement was no longer like before; it was uneven, faltering, like prey weakened by exhaustion or struck by some internal failure. She saw him clearly through her compound eyes that captured even the faintest particles of light.

  His scent was abnormal, filling the corridor with a familiar trace.

  Then suddenly—

  he stopped.

  He collapsed to his knees.

  She paid no attention to his stumble, nor did she question the reason. Exhausted prey was merely an easier meal, a target whose end would not take long. But as the distance between them shrank, something else caught her attention… something her senses could not mistake.

  The scent.

  Its particles flowed into her antennae like a venomous sting. The delicate feelers trembled sharply as they absorbed the chemical signals emanating from the creature’s body.

  A familiar smell…

  Warm.

  Small.

  Fragile.

  The scent of her brood.

  Her armored body stiffened for a moment. The creature did not merely carry the scent—he was drenched in it, saturated with it to the marrow. In her perception, he was no longer a lost intruder or a stray prey that had wandered into the tunnels.

  He was—

  a killer.

  She had known it from the beginning, from the moment she first detected that trace of scent upon him. But now, with every breath that entered her spiracles, the smell invaded her more intensely.

  Piercing her.

  Reminding her.

  Of the image of torn eggs… and the small body that had fallen still forever in the darkness of the chamber.

  The fury that surged through her was not an emotional outburst as humans understood it. It was a biological command—an imperative etched into the depths of her genetic code.

  Her legs dug deeper into the rocky ground, carving fine cracks beneath the weight of her body. The air around her began to vibrate with a low, rising screech, like a machine on the verge of exploding.

  She was no longer chasing him because he was an intruder.

  She was chasing him because…

  he had taken something from her.

  She watched him strike his own body—pounding his stomach with his small fist in desperate motions, trying to force his limbs to obey. She observed his final attempts with the cold detachment of a predator. The clearer the scent became within her senses, the deeper and steadier her fury grew.

  She lunged.

  Her forelegs rose, poised to pierce. She saw him crawling, reaching toward the dark crack in the wall.

  The distance: zero.

  She brought her leg down with the full force of her body, with the crushing weight of her vengeance, aiming for his exposed back—now within reach of her blade-like limb.

  (CRAAAAAASH)

  The entrance of the crevice shattered. Rocks exploded outward like shrapnel beneath the impact that should have reduced him to a paste of flesh and bone.

  But—

  her strike closed upon solid emptiness.

  The scent vanished instantly.

  The creature had slipped into the darkness.

  Her screech fell silent. Her massive head lowered toward the narrow crack, too small to admit her armored body. Her antennae began to twitch violently, striking the jagged stone edges as they searched for the trail of the killer who had slipped from her grasp at the final moment.

  The fury that had driven her did not fade; it condensed into a constant buzzing inside her mind.

  She remained there, her colossal body blocking the entrance of the crack, staring into the darkness—while behind her, the army of ants watched in absolute silence.

  Noah’s body crashed onto the cold stone floor, thrown forward by the violent recoil caused when the mother ant’s strike collided with the mouth of the crevice. He lay there in a twisted posture, dragging ragged breaths that tore through the stillness of the cavern. His fingers spasmed and relaxed against the smooth stone, clinging desperately to reality.

  The venom boiling in his veins began to subside gradually. The sickly green pulses beneath his skin receded, and the swollen veins shrank back to their natural size, leaving behind a heavy numbness spreading through his limbs.

  Noah drew in a deep breath, feeling it expand his fractured ribcage with bitter pain. Then he released a long exhale as his wavering vision finally steadied.

  He had survived.

  The blow the “mother” had delivered to the entrance had been so powerful that it had hurled him several meters into this dark hollow—away from the jaws that had nearly crushed him.

  Slowly, painfully, he lifted his head. The vertebrae in his neck cracked audibly in the oppressive silence.

  He looked upward.

  There was nothing but a ceiling of dark rock that swallowed the light… and the sound of a lone drop of water falling somewhere deeper within, its echo striking liquid below and reverberating through the cavern, suggesting a vast and unsettling emptiness hidden in the darkness.

  Suddenly, his gaze froze.

  At first it wasn’t something he saw. It was a resonant tremor deep at the base of his skull, followed by a flash behind his eyelids that formed itself into words and symbols—etchings that burned into his awareness with startling clarity:

  [The Mark Has Expanded] … [1/50] … [Recorded]

  Noah’s entire body stiffened. His pupils widened in stunned disbelief that paralyzed his ability to think.

  “Haaah…!”

  The sound slipped from between his lips as a lost whisper. He slowly shook his head, trying desperately to dismiss the vision—this hallucination, this madness—but the inscription remained for several seconds before sinking deep into the recesses of his memory.

  Pressing his trembling palms against the ground, he forced his exhausted body upward. The effort made the muscles of his back groan in protest. He crawled slowly until his back touched the cold stone wall, using it as support to guard the back of his head.

  His breathing was still heavy. His chest rose and fell in a strained rhythm. Yet his survival instinct had fully awakened. His eyes began scanning the surroundings anxiously. He moved his head in subtle motions, watching every corner, every crack, every suspicious shadow that the silence might be hiding.

  He saw no movement.

  He heard nothing except his own breathing and the distant dripping of water.

  Still, he remained tense—like a drawn bowstring ready to release—refusing to surrender to this deceptive calm.

  Noah ran his hands over his body with weary care, his fingers slowly tracing his arm and shoulder, as if confirming that he still existed.

  “I didn’t expect the gap in strength between a normal ant and the Mother Ant to be this large…”

  He whispered the words into the darkness. The thought hurt more than the open wounds across his body.

  He had eaten the ants’ flesh. He had felt his strength increase…

  But it hadn’t been nearly enough.

  He couldn’t even withstand a single strike from the Mother Ant.

  The difference wasn’t just a small advantage.

  It was a gulf.

  A terrifying chasm that could not be bridged for now.

  He remembered the moment the blow struck his side—how it hurled him through the air without resistance, how he slammed into the wall like a discarded doll. All the physical strength he had gained felt insignificant before that colossal mass.

  “So… I’m still weak.”

  He said it calmly.

  The words carried no overwhelming despair—only realization. A cold truth that had to be acknowledged.

  If he wanted to survive in this place, he needed to understand its rules far better.

  Strength alone would never be enough.

  In the chaos of blood and struggle, Noah had forgotten a fundamental truth: he was human.

  And humans possessed something those armored beasts did not.

  Timing. Intelligence. The ability to exploit opportunity.

  In the end, those traits might prove far more powerful than raw muscle.

  For humanity—despite its clear physical weakness compared to many savage creatures—had, over the course of time, risen to the top of the food chain. Not because it was the strongest, the fastest, or the most heavily armored…

  But because it was the smartest.

  Humans adapted to every brutal condition. They learned from every defeat. They used the tools around them with ingenuity and studied their environments with precision.

  Throughout history, humanity had turned its exposed weaknesses into innovative methods of survival and dominance.

  And that was the only path Noah could take now.

  He carved the thought deep into his mind as a new vow to himself: brute strength alone would never be the solution in this underworld.

  Intelligence. Adaptation. And the precise exploitation of the right moment.

  Those would be the tools that determined whether he remained prey—

  or became the hunter.

  With that realization flowing through his spirit before his body, Noah tightened his weary muscles, pressed his palms against the cold rock—

  and stood.