Keiran

“That’s unexpected,” I murmured as I settled into a sitting position in the air next to the ‘tree.’ “Sapient creatures.”

I couldn’t find a singular mind to connect with to return its telepathic communications. Clearly, this was some sort of gestalt entity, not unusual for a hive species that specialized in divination magic. If it came down to a fight, its strength could be overwhelming until I thinned its numbers.

Before I crushed the entire colony, I’d try communicating first. As unlikely as it was that this entity would know anything useful, it wouldn’t hurt to ask questions. If it turned hostile, I’d crush it. If it was merely uncooperative, I could just leave now that I understood the source of the mana I’d scried.

“Can you hear me?” I asked. Hopefully it could, since I wasn’t eager to blindly broadcast my thoughts so that anything nearby could hear them.

‘We hear,’ the entity responded.

Good. That made this a bit easier. “I’m not here to fight you. I’m looking for an immense source of mana buried deep underground somewhere near here.”

The gestalt didn’t respond.

“I know you’re not what I came down here to find,” I added. “Your mana network is impressive, but I’m looking for something else. Could you point me in the right direction?”

‘Why would we help you?’ the gestalt asked. ‘What claim do you have to this mana source? Why is your need greater than whoever currently owns it?’

“Does that mean you know where it is?”

‘Perhaps. If we refuse to tell you, will you bend the light of the Astral Realm to your will to scour us from existence?’

It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time I’d destroyed something that had gotten in my way, but there was no gain to crushing a somewhat unique lifeform that couldn’t possibly cause me any problems.

“No,” I said. “There’s no point. An entity like yourself can’t be compelled to give information it doesn’t want to. Even if I could destroy you, it would change nothing.”

‘It’s not that your morals or ethics are holding you back. It is a matter of practicality.’

“Yes,” I agreed. “I’m not given to sentimentalities.”

‘We have no answers for you.’

“I don’t think I believe that,” I said. “I think you know where the thing I’m looking for is. And if that’s the case, then there’s no reason we can’t come to an agreement. You know what I want; what can I do for you? Knowledge? Enchantments? Some sort of raw material to build with?”

‘Our goals are our own. We neither require nor want an outsider’s help.’

My magic showed me more of the ant-creatures crawling out of the walls of the cavern, hundreds of thousands of them at least. The black-glass tree might have been the core of their home, but it wasn’t the sum of it. Its roots went deep into the stone, deeper than I could feel out with earth sense. Perfect.

“How many of you are there?” I asked. “A million? Two? More?”

‘Are you reconsidering the use of force?’

“The opposite.” I needed to keep this conversation going for another two minutes. “This far from the surface, it must be hard to find prey. The only other creature I’ve seen down here is a master of stealth, and huge besides.”

‘We shall survive, just as we always have.’

“I’m sure you will. How much of your population dies when times get lean?”

‘Irrelevant. We are a collective. No individual physical body matters.’

“So you say, and yet there are so many of you. There exists some desire to continue to expand in there, which means your physical bodies need sustenance.”

I pulled a piece of fruit from my phantom space and dropped it to the glass floor below. It rolled a few times before settling into the dip between two of the waves. Hundreds of crystalline, translucent ants immediately crawled all over it.

‘Your offer is noted and rejected,’ the gestalt sent. ‘Such a trivial amount of food means nothing.’

The fruit started to float back up to me, undamaged despite being buried in ants for a few seconds. “That’s a sample,” I said, making no move to reclaim it. “I can give you a thousand thousand times more food than that.”

The first chunk of my invisible assailant floated down from the hole in the ceiling. I’d cut it apart with remote force magic and brought it down here with telekinesis. It would take another few minutes to butcher the entire corpse, and even longer to transport the meat down here, but I’d carved off enough to make my offer.

‘You claim to offer food that was already destined to sustain our physical bodies.’

“How so? This is meat from my kill, freely offered. I would be happy to trade the rest for information about the mana source I’m looking for.”

‘No. This kill was abandoned.’

Pressure mounted in my head as I fended off the gestalt’s thoughts. Anger bled into its words, either because it was unable to regulate the mental connection it had forged, or because it did not care to. Whatever the reason, the gestalt was starting to stress my wards, but I didn’t let it show on my face. A bit of mana to reinforce them guaranteed my continued safety, not to mention keeping it from reading my own thoughts.

If the gestalt realized that I was growing annoyed enough to consider filling this entire room with fire, it probably wouldn’t be willing to negotiate with me. It would be a shame if I’d wasted all this time and effort only to walk away no better off than when I’d started.

I let the slab of meat drop to the ground. “It was still my kill. I can easily take it with me, but I’d be happy to trade it to you. I’ll even transport the rest of it down here. All I want to know is where to find the mana source in the area.”

Ants swarmed over the meat, so many that even though I could see through them, they covered the food with a sort of blurry haze not unlike looking through a poorly constructed camouflage spell. It took seconds for them to carve up the meat into a thousand pieces small enough to be carried away, a not-so-subtle reminder of what they could do to me if I wasn’t careful.

‘This is not enough,’ the gestalt sent. ‘What you ask for will cause the death of millions. Providing us with sustenance today means nothing if we trade it for starvation tomorrow.’

It had a point there. If I removed the moon core, which I was planning on doing once I found it, the worms that dominated the sands below Derro would most likely die. Monsters needed mana to live, and it was the rare specimen that could generate enough mana to survive without an outside source. Some could, of course, but usually only small and weak monsters.

It was impossible to predict the impact removing the moon core would have on the local ecosystem. The worms appeared to be the apex predators to me, but I’d done very little in the way of exploration. I didn’t even know what other monsters lived down here, let alone how many of them relied on the worms in some way. This colony of ants seemed contained to this relatively small area, but there was no telling how deep they’d burrowed through this stone to reach food sources.

Maybe I could solve two problems here. “I have a proposal. How willing would you be to relocate to a new home near the surface where regular food could be provided?”

‘Unnecessary.’ The gestalt almost sounded confused. ‘We have everything we need here.’

“For now,” I said. “But rest assured, I’m not going to give up my search just because you decide not to help me. If you’re concerned about your food supply disappearing were you to give me the location of that giant, mana-producing rock, that will still be a concern for you in the future.”

‘Then it seems that the proper course of action to ensure our continued survival is to stop you from ever leaving this place,’ the gestalt said.

“You could try,” I said with a shrug. “You won’t succeed, not unless your ability to attack my mind is much, much stronger than you’ve led me to believe.”

‘Perhaps it is time to find out.’

The gestalt lashed out at me with all the strength its collective millions upon millions of members could muster. I floated there, unperturbed, a veritable rock at sea withstanding the beating of the waves on it. The difference here was that the ocean would continue to slam against that rock endlessly, slowly and inevitably wearing it down. The gestalt couldn’t, and unlike the rock, I could fight back.

It was by no means weak, but my mental defenses were solid years before I’d ventured into this place, and I’d used the last few minutes to reinforce my passive abilities with a few choice barriers specifically designed to resist the constant deluge of pressure this particular type of entity was known for outputting.

The gestalt’s attacks were primarily mental, but it did have millions upon millions of bodies, several thousand of which poured out of holes in the black-glass ceiling to rain down on me, only to strike my shield ward and bounce off or slide away. There was no purchase to be found there, and rather than cling to me, they were scattered across the floor.

I was content to let the two-pronged offense go on for a few minutes, just to prove my point, but the gestalt wasn’t stupid. It quickly realized the futility of the fight and ceased its assault. ‘We have no desire to leave our home, but it seems you leave us with little choice, assuming you haven’t decided to obliterate us now.’

“If you’re ready to listen to my offer now, I’m still willing to give it out.”

‘We will listen.’

I’d expected it would. Most gestalts were beings of logic and reasoning. They had to be in order to form a gestalt. Strong emotions could break the union and tear the entity apart. Besides, they were ants. It wasn’t like they were known for their tempers.

“There is a place full of portals to far off lands,” I said. “The portals are used by a flock of enormous birds, so big that they would have difficulty fitting in this chamber. The amount of food they consume daily is so great that to feed all of your vessels wouldn’t even be a snack to them. They would have no issue providing you with all the sustenance you need to multiply your numbers several times over.”

‘What would they want in return?’ the entity asked.

“Invaders came through the portals recently. They were killed or driven off, but there are more that could arrive at any moment. I propose that you reestablish your colony in the rock face that the cliffs are built into. It would be trivial for you to keep watch over the portals and sound the alarm if more invaders come through.”

‘That is all you would require? A simple warning?’

“Yes. If you wanted to subdue and interrogate any intruders, you’d be welcome to keep them when you were done, but you wouldn’t have to.”

‘And in return, you will claim the mana stone here using the knowledge we give you, irreparably altering the world forever and likely causing everything that lives here to starve.’

“Something like that,” I agreed. I wasn’t about to feel sorry for a bunch of simple-minded worms that had vastly overgrown their place in the food chain because their ancestors had lucked into stumbling across a source of unlimited mana a thousand years ago.

The gestalt didn’t say anything. Long seconds stretched on while it thought, likely an eternity to it considering the way its collective consciousness worked. Then, suddenly, I was bombarded with a mental map of everything within a few miles of the colony’s home, including the moon core buried under a mile or more of sand beneath me.

“It seems we have a deal,” I said with a smile. “Let’s talk logistics.”