Re: Butterfly (Reincarnated as a Butterfly)

Adon shot forward impossibly quickly, faster than was physically possible, in theory, even with his mana-enhanced wings. He could sense the surprise in the spiders behind him at the speed with which his glowing body receded into the space ahead of them.

The butterfly was already putting to use one of the new Skills he had acquired, Rapid Movement I. Every flap of his wings moved him roughly an additional twenty-five percent further than it normally would, using this Skill. With that effect stacked atop his high physical power and mana enhancement, he substantially cut the distance between himself and the larger party with every single forward motion. There wasn't really even a physics explanation for how the Skill worked, as far as Adon could tell. It was just an ability for quietly telling the laws of reality to sit down and shut up for a while, if only for a fleeting moment.

But Adon could not even revel in the Skill very much.

That voice in the back of his mind had gone dormant now, and Adon almost felt as if he had imagined it. An unpleasant sense of foreboding had taken its place.

Adon had not had much time to digest the sudden change in his cognition, but he was fairly certain that the mysterious voice had been his new Extrasensory Perception Organs at work. The Adaptation had promised to change his brain, and he had suffered the accompanying splitting headache that confirmed his brain was being altered.

Apparently an occasional voice in his head that he wasn't expecting might just be part of the experience of being forewarned about threats that he would have to get used to.

Adon put on another burst of speed, and he felt the spiders get a bit more distant, and the human members of the party grow correspondingly closer.

He used Rapid Movement three more times before he was close enough that he decided the additional resource consumption wasn't worth it to keep going. At that point, he could see the party's outlines more clearly.

They mostly stood near the entrance to the tunnel, locked in battle with a squad of Gold-Digging Ants that looked like it outnumbered the humans roughly two to one—though that status quo was clearly far from stable, as Adon could see the ground littered with the corpses of ants, and at the same time, more were continuously approaching.

Most of the corpses are jammed up against the entrance, Adon noticed. This was clearly not coincidental. They had been pressed up into the shape of a little golden, chitinous wall that subsequently arriving ants had to climb over to gain entry—like the beginnings of a makeshift fortification, perhaps established before the ants had really arrived in numbers.

Or like a golden gate that the ants were now easily streaming through.

As he reached the location of the skirmish, the spiders and William were well behind him, making Adon far and away the first of the cavalry to come to the rescue.

The humans did not seem to notice Adon's arrival, locked as they were in battle with a number of monsters that required their constant attention. They were doing well—no significant injuries on the human side, and they were still managing to throw the dead ants in the general direction of the cave entrance after each kill.

Adon, for his part, struggled at first to think of how he could contribute to the fighting. The lack of real injuries meant no healing magic was needed. He knew that his mana ball and fire magic wouldn't work. Trying to use Telepathy to get into the ants' brains had only hurt his head earlier. They probably had some sort of mental protection, maybe an ability of their queen's.

If so, that would make these creatures probably the most well crafted creatures to counter him that he had ever encountered.

He hovered there for a few seconds, helpless, trying to decide what he could do.

The pivotal moment came when a knight was struck by an unexpectedly heavy tackle to the leg and sent stumbling back into a stalagmite. The knight's armored leg slammed hard into the rock formation—so hard that the stalagmite snapped off at the base. Then the knight's back struck the wall, and he used it like a springboard to bounce back and charged forward, into the fight again.

Adon's eyes didn't follow the knight as he returned to smash the ant that had tackled him. They stayed on the stalagmite.

I wonder if I could lift that, he thought.

He of course meant with Telekinesis. Back when Adon fought the eagle on the mountain, he had used Telekinesis to cling to the creature, basically pulling Adon's own body weight with his telekinetic muscle. Since he had upgraded that Adaptation, it stood to reason he should be able to lift somewhere more than his own body weight now. He decided to give it a try.

Adon activated Telekinesis and reached out to the rock the knight had broken off. It was like lifting a dumbbell made for him—not exactly easy, but not too hard either. He quickly chucked it at one of the gold-coated insect's heads, before he could lose his grip on the stone, and he heard a loud thud and crunch as it struck.

As the stalagmite tumbled away from the ant, which had been one of two squaring off with Sir Humphrey, the insect that had been struck staggered. Adon saw its head was half caved in.

How is it still moving? he wondered.

Then its legs bent, its body shook, and it crumpled onto its side, finally rolling over on its back. Its legs curled in on its torso, twitched a few more times, and then the bug lay still.

Oh. Dead as a doornail. That's better.

In the meantime, Sir Humphrey had taken advantage of the lack of distraction to quickly dispatch the other one with a decapitation stroke. He kicked both bodies over to the entrance, turned to look at Adon, and mouthed, "Thank you!"

That set the pattern for the next twenty minutes or so. Adon used Telekinesis to help kill a significant chunk of ants. He could not have said, afterward, that he had played any kind of a decisive role in the skirmish, but the ants were particularly vulnerable to blunt force damage. He could confidently affirm that he had done his part.

Whatever the cause, soon after Adon had arrived, the tide of the battle grew clear. The humans started successfully pushing more and more dead ants into the golden gate around the entrance that Adon had mentioned earlier, filling in the gaps and making it more and more like a gilded wall.

At the same time that more ants were dying and being turned into makeshift bricks, the number streaming through the entrance slowed to a trickle and gradually stopped. Maybe the colony was running out. More likely, they lost interest in throwing away their investment and getting no meat in return.

Perhaps there was even some implicit sense of the space belonging to the Quugaarpaks and the ants not wanting to trespass.

Whatever the reason, the cave entrance was soon closed off with ant bodies.

Someone lit a torch, and the group gathered around it. The scene felt primitive, like they were cavemen, stripped to the most basic conditions of survival.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Any dead?" Rosslyn's voice pierced the gloom, and she stepped forward from the darkness to stand near the center of the torchlight.

There was no verbal response, just slow shaking of heads.

The Princess looked relieved.

"We all made it," she said, half under her breath. Then, more loudly: "Thank the Goddess."

"Thank the Goddess," the others echoed, nodding. The crew was unmistakably exhausted.

Besides the ant corpses stuffed into the entrance, there were still others that littered the ground. Their dozens of soldiers had killed a hundred—at least. Probably significantly more than one hundred.

All without suffering a single casualty.

Missing. There was the voice from Adon's Extrasensory Perception Organs again. In the back of his mind.

He felt gripped by foreboding again.

What are we missing? he wondered. Or… is someone gone?

Rosslyn's eyes settled on Adon, her face lit up—and then her expression turned bittersweet as if remembering their earlier interaction.

"Adon, I am glad you made it back safely," she said. "I noticed you in the fighting. I hope William and the spiders are all right?"

And what about the rest of the cave? she added in her mind. Is it safe in there?

William and the spiders, Adon began transmitting—but then the young lord himself, with the spiders standing on his shoulders, stepped into the firelight.

"We just barely made it back, Your Highness," he said, rubbing his head as he spoke. His injury was clearly still causing him some amount of pain. "Adon was faster, so we thought it would be best to let him go ahead."

He's hiding his injury? Adon thought. What, is the guy embarrassed about getting hurt? It seemed like a bad move to the butterfly. Then again, he wasn't royalty.

"We have so many reasons to be thankful today," Rosslyn said, smiling as she looked back and forth between William and the arthropods, mainly Adon. "I have a feeling that this part of our journey could have ended much worse than appears to be the case."

"I would not celebrate just yet," William said. "The bad news is that the inhabitants of the tunnel are unlucky to become friends."

Rosslyn's eyes darted to Adon before they returned to William, as if she was instantly curious about the butterfly's side of that story, but knew that William was the one who she should be listening to just then.

"That is bad news," she said. "Thank you for the exploration. What sort of monsters are they, the ones who live in this cave?"

Well, to start with, it's a network of caves, Adon transmitted quickly. He knew that he understood the monsters—their social structure, their motivations, their habit, literally everything—better than William did, so he wanted to be the one to tell the story this time.

And, to Adon's mild surprise, William stayed silent and let him.

They spent the next several minutes with Adon pushing down mild nervousness to tell the entire group a lightly edited version of what had happened—edited to remove William's possible responsibility for turning the monsters against the group. Adon did not want to alienate William any more than he already had, nor sow divisions within the group when they needed to be united. And he also thought it would look bad on his part to criticize someone else for his part in the mission. Adon was supposed to be the diplomat of the group, strange though that sounded as a thought inside his head. The failure of diplomacy was ultimately his responsibility.

Again surprising him, Adon sensed telepathically that William not only understood what he was doing, but he was grudgingly grateful.

After the explanations were done, Rosslyn gave some instructions, and the group split up to perform various needed tasks and begin sleeping in shifts.

Adon found a good moment and took his opportunity to speak to the Princess alone.

There was something that had been bothering him.

It wasn't the romantic stuff. That was bothering him, but it was not a good reason for him to interrupt her cleaning and caring for her weapons. Rosslyn had been right before when she said the middle of a dungeon really wasn't the time or the place.

No, it was the little feeling in the back of his head that compelled him to seek the Princess out. That tickle from Extrasensory Perception, if the Extrasensory Perception Organs truly were responsible for this, had not gone away. It weighed on him.

Princess, is it possible that we might have some people missing? Adon sent.

"Missing?" she asked, frowning and biting her lower lip. She spoke her next words in a whisper. "Why would you say that? Did you see something happen?"

You could almost call it a hunch, Adon replied. Don't put too much stock in it just yet, but I got a new Adaptation: Extrasensory Perception Organs. I think it's telling me that something or someone went missing from the group.

I would enjoy having more than that to go on, Rosslyn thought quietly, but just loud enough for him to hear. Reluctantly, he could tell, she decided to check out his "hunch."

"I will ask for a head count," she said.

He felt, without her saying, why she was unhappy to do it. The group was drained from fighting, and only now that the entrance to the tunnel was stopped up with a pile of corpses did they have the feeling of some degree of security. And now she was going to go, based on Adon's hunch, and possibly scare them with the prospect that there were some of them going missing.

It was a measure of how much she trusted Adon and his abilities that she did not argue the point at all.

Without telling the group exactly why, Rosslyn organized a quick head count.

She found that there were twenty-seven humans in the group, including the leaders from both Claustria and Dessia.

"That is… fewer than we should have," Rosslyn murmured slowly. "Even accounting for how the level with the flying enemies whittled down our numbers."

Somehow I expected it might be, Adon transmitted in a soft tone. He absolutely did not want to come off as saying "I told you so" right now.

"What are we going to do?" she asked quietly, her voice trembling. He felt a fear from the Princess that he had never seen in her before.

The unknown, after all, was the most terrifying thing possible.

We'll figure it out, he sent.

They recounted the group, and they tried to reckon with the numerical disparities again, but once more, the results were confusing and disturbing.

Ultimately, Rosslyn and William took a roll call, making it obvious that there were indeed missing people, if there were some knights who had not yet picked up on it. And all the leaders could say was that they could confirm that fact, but they did not know what had happened to them.

Adon could feel the nervousness in the group rising perceptibly with each passing minute without answers.

But there seemed to be bigger problems than the emotional reaction.

There are definitely at least two people completely unaccounted for, Rosslyn thought quietly, the words clearly directed at Adon.

She elaborated.

In the chaos of the earlier retreat during the first ant attack, Rosslyn thought it was possible that two knights had died and been left behind. But that still only accounted for half of the number that the group was down on this level. No one had died in the last skirmish, as far as anyone had witnessed. So there were at least two knights simply missing, and it was impossible to be certain whether that number had vanished earlier in the level, during the fighting, or in the shadowy blackness of the cave at some point.

The explosion that had sealed their cavern on one side and the pile of bodies that stopped it up on the other would not provide any protection if the Quugaarpaks were after them; they could move through the ground, after all. Adon could not imagine those large creatures subtly disappearing the knights, but he had no other viable theory for what had happened to them.

All Adon knew was that the darkness of the cave looked more menacing than any shadows he had ever seen before as they wondered what had happened.