Chapter 243: Stupid Ants

The eighth wave arrived right on time. However, he was surprised when it wasn’t another group of hobgoblins. The rift must have decided to change things up for him. In their place was something he had been praying not to show up.

Something he had thought wouldn’t show up this late in the waves.

All around him, gathered on every side of the hill was a countless horde of ants the size of small dogs.

There were so many he couldn’t even begin to count.

It was just a black wall of moving dots as they made their way up the hill.

He cursed the rift once more. He hated insects. Ants, cockroaches, mosquitos, and flies.

He understood that ants had their purpose in nature. They helped aerate the ground, but he still didn’t like them too much. It probably stemmed from him falling into an anthill when he was young and came out with scars littering his legs for the rest of his life.

Lingering resentment tended to stay with a person when something like that happened to them. It also didn’t help that these ants were hundreds of times larger than the ones he was used to.

When he looked down the hill again he couldn’t help but get the creepy crawlies.

There were so many ants.

But on the other hand, he was glad that the rift had chosen ants. Since they were ants, he was free to go wild. He was actually looking forward to crushing them.

He raised his hand upward into the air dramatically and clenched it into a fist. He wouldn’t leave any alive, that was his promise.

The ants weren’t that strong either. Most of them were only Tier 2, but some among them were Tier 3. And he was able to feel one particularly strong one shine out from the rest. This one most likely had a Concept of its own and was the one controlling the rest.

Perhaps, it was their queen or something.

He was already moving before he was even aware of it himself. He tossed out a strong spike of mana at the queen. But was surprised to see a literal wave of ants come crashing down onto the queen and protect it with their own bodies.

The spike detonated and caused an explosion that killed at least a couple dozen ants. But he wasn’t able to hurt the queen. Soon afterward, the ants all swarmed the queen and covered her in countless layers of bodies.

He didn’t think he would be getting through something like that very easily. Not even if he used his blue flames and a lot of mana.

Even if he did, it wouldn’t likely work. The queen would simply just move away once he was close to hitting her.

While these ants weren’t strong there was such a large number of them that he couldn’t help but feel a little nervous.

He wasn’t nervous because he was afraid of dying to these ants but because he was worried about how much mana he was going to have to use to deal with all of them.

He suspected that was the rift’s plan. It was possible that the prior waves were just to get an idea of his skills and test him in various ways. But now it realized that it would need to drain Julius of his mana.

Or perhaps he was giving too much credit to the rift.

He shook his head, no matter how well he did on conserving his mana, he would have to use a lot in order to take them all out.

However, he did have an idea already in mind though.

It was a little cowardly and wasn’t something he had practiced yet, but he believed it would help him have more mana left over after this wave was complete.

Besides, it was an idea he had been wanting to try for a long time now. He did feel like he was ready though.

Well… he hoped that he was.

With a loud boom, he jumped and released a burst of kinetic energy from his feet.

He got pretty high off of that one jump and right as he reached the apex, he created a panel of mana below his feet that acted like a platform. He then used this panel to jump even higher up. It was a little hard to maintain the panel stable in the air, but his manipulation and willpower had increased vastly in these past couple of months, and was able to do so with a little extra effort.

He repeated this a couple of times until he was happy with his position and finally rested onto a stable platform high in the sky. He wasn’t actually flying, but it would give him a higher vantage point where he could use his long-ranged attacks without being harassed.

This gave him a simple way to relax and conserve his mana.

Getting overwhelmed by sheer numbers seemed like the biggest danger. It also helped a lot that this way he didn’t need to get any closer to them. Now he would be able to throw down as many spikes as he wanted with plenty of time to regenerate some of his mana as he did so.

It didn’t hurt that he also didn’t need to actually touch them, but that totally wasn’t the reason why he chose this strategy. Definitely not.

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He didn’t see any wings on them and didn’t see a way for them to deal with him easily. In fact, he was already mentally preparing himself that the next wave would have something that would prevent him from doing the same tactic once more.

He created a nice couple dozen orbs of mana, each one was made for its explosiveness and how much area it could cover, rather than for piercing defenses. They were beautiful things. Deep swirling blue flames danced around the orbs looking like pretty little balls of death.

Since he was safe up here, he decided to test if his blue flames would be more efficient.

He gave the ants below, who were already at the top of the hill one last smug smile before he dropped all of them off of his little platform like dropping glass marbles to the floor.

The explosions below rang out like a beautiful symphony of fire and death.

Each orb was actually stronger than he thought it would be. These orbs created massive craters that tore apart countless ants in a single blast. He even got a little lucky and took out a few Tier 3s when they got too close to the blast radius.

He didn’t follow up the bombard immediately afterward either, he just sat down on the platform he created and watched the ants run around in chaos as his mana recovered passively.

He couldn’t help but draw comparisons to people in his old world who would burn down antshills or pour molten metal down them. He had never done that before so this was a novel experience for him.

He could understand why these people used to laugh when they did it too, because at the moment he was close to cheering out in joy.

While he waited, he thought he might as well check the notifications he had been putting off since the beginning of the rift.

[Armaments of the Arcane lvl 7 -> lvl 8]