This is the first chapter of the day, and the previous chapter was forgotten last night. No surprises tonight... One more chapter!

- I'm the dividing line -

These mysterious ants exhibit many characteristics that distinguish them from the common ant races on both sides of the river.

The first is belligerence.

Ants are mostly warlike, but this belligerence is more often reflected in the struggle for resources and territory, but there are few ants that fight specifically for killing.

The mysterious ants are not allies, and whether they are facing paving ants, black-headed sour ants, or Japanese black brown ants, they are all under constant attack, and they seem to throw all their forces into the war, killing for the sake of killing.

So much so that after estimation, the protagonist is even more determined to the idea that this kind of ants feed on ant carcasses.

After all, the Flying Knights had not seen any food production in the territory occupied by the mysterious ants on the north bank of the Great River during several adventurous long-distance reconnaissance expeditions.

Neither gathering nor hunting, even if the mysterious ants hide in the ground to grow fungi, like leaf-cutting ants, they never collect plants to make culture media.

The only things they carry back to their nests are ant carcasses, eggs and pupae of both the same and other races, and a lot of sand of various colors.

The sand and gravel may be used to fortify the nest, but the large number of ant corpses is terrifying, just as humans are naturally afraid of cannibals, and the protagonist has to be wary of this highly suspected "ant meat" race.

Although it is not known why the mysterious ants have this eating habit, if this habit is true, it means that the race must constantly expand and attack other ants in order to get enough food.

No ant, including the Legion of the Divine Envoy King, can make peace with this mysterious ant. Just as humans don't heed the so-called "peace agreement" that pigs, cows and sheep demand that humans live together peacefully and stop eating them.

Probably because of their eating habits, these ants have no record of attacking insects other than ants. Even if many insects are obviously nutritious and readily available, these ants are dismissive.

This is very inconsistent with the laws of biological evolution, even advanced creatures such as humans and orangutans will not give up the primitive but delicious, protein-rich little prey of snails.

But these mysterious ants willingly gave up.

The second characteristic of the mysterious ant is its large number.

This enormity is only relative, after all, with the huge size of the mysterious ant, it is unrealistic to want to have a number of people of the same size as the Paving Ant Barbarian Kingdom.

In the battle to defend the main nest of the paving ant barbarians, the mysterious ants were also repelled by more than ten times the paving ant barbarian army.

However, these mysterious ants can often dispatch tens of thousands of warriors at a time, which is very terrifying.

The Japanese humpback ant, which was the same size, used to live in the northern mountains, but now it is no trace and may have been wiped out. The size of its tribe is only a few hundred or thousand.

The number of mysterious ants, conservatively estimated, may already be in the tens of thousands, they are a swarm, subject to unified command.

With such a large population, they still feed on ant carcasses, so how many ants do they have to eat every day in order to maintain daily food consumption? How many ant tribes and nests are destroyed? The number is unimaginable.

Moreover, the number of mysterious ants seems to be increasing.

When they were repelled by the Paving Ant Barbarian Army, the flying knights who continued to go to the war zone to reconnoiter reported that there were about 10,000 mysterious ants.

However, after suffering some losses and being repulsed, these mysterious ants were able to dispatch more than 10,000 of them when they attacked the Japanese black brown ant and the black-headed sour ant again.

By the time their troops approached the north bank of the river, the flying knights reconnoitred more frequently and accurately and found that these mysterious ants had been able to divide into four clusters and sweep through all the ants in the dense forest with a scale of 10,000 in each cluster.

The third characteristic of the mysterious ant is that they still seem to be composed of multiple races, or it is a kind of slave ant.

For a long time, the flying knights under the command of the protagonist did not notice this, and the protagonist has always regarded the enemy as a kind of large, swarm, cruel and resolute ants, such enemies are not without methods of targeting and restraint, and the protagonist still has time to explore.

However, as we approach the end of autumn and the weather is getting colder, the situation has changed.

Ants are cold-blooded creatures and do not like too cold environments, and only a few ants, such as paver ants, can effectively use the temperature of sunlight to go out during the day in winter when the conditions are right.

Because of the high-calorie food and the support of certain equipment, the flying knights barely managed to maintain their attendance.

They also observed that on the battlefield in the dense forest area on the north bank of the river, whether it was the big mysterious ant or the smaller Japanese black brown ant and black-headed sour ant, there were signs of slowness.

This shows that winter is coming, the good times of the ants are about to pass, and the ants need to hide from the cat winter.

For the mysterious ants, according to the normal routine, their expansion this year should be over, ready to deal with the elimination mechanism of the harsh winter, and survive until the beginning of spring next year to show their fangs - of course, the protagonist wishes that all these "anteaters" would be frozen to death.

For the indigenous tribes of black-headed sour ants and Japanese black-brown ants, the surviving tribes should be glad that they can survive the winter shelter, even if they suffer heavy losses due to lack of food, rather than being exterminated by the enemy and reduced to food.

For the Paving Ant Barbarians, Winter is their ally, and they can even launch a counteroffensive to regain lost territory. Of course, the protagonist wants them to counterattack the mysterious ants and weaken this evil enemy, rather than counterattack the northern expeditionary forces of the Big-Headed Ant Kingdom.

Just when the protagonist feels that the threat of the mysterious ant has temporarily subsided, there is an unexpected change on the battlefield.

According to the Flying Knights' urgent report, they found that on the battlefield in late autumn, some "paving ants" appeared to fight side by side with mysterious ants.

The protagonist immediately looks up the packet, and he quickly recognizes that the newly emerged ants are not "paving ants".

They have a similar body shape and color to the "paver ants", but the head is the shape of a mysterious ant, but it is several sizes smaller.

Although the structure of the thorax and abdomen is different from that of a large mysterious ant, there are similarities.

This newly emerged little ant should also be the same family of mysterious ants, otherwise it is impossible to explain why the two can fight side by side without any trouble.

However, these small mysterious ants soon show an ability that the big mysterious ants do not have, which makes the protagonist doubt his own previous judgment.