Wiping my non-existent tears, I take a deep breath and plop myself on the ground. 

This is all gonna take a few days for me to fully wrap my head around this new world. Of course this is just a theory I have for now. But at this point I’m not even 100% sure I wanna live on in this world. 

Smacking my face with my front legs. 

No, no, no, Ariki do not think like that. After all, I dealt with this kind of fear and depressing way of thinking when I was supporting Isa… 

She’d often drop depressing thoughts onto me whether we’d be gaming online or hanging out together at school. I was always there to change her mind. 

I sincerely hope now more than ever she takes all that I’ve told her to heart and continue living… Come to think of it, I can’t… really remember what happened just before I died, only that terrible chest pain and falling down. Hurts my head thinking about it, ugh… 

After wondering and worrying for my family and friends back in my previous life, I sit up and check the rest of the menu options. Selecting [Colony] showed all the ants under my rule, their stats, skills, LVs, and classes. All the other worker ants’ LVs averaged around LV 4 and a few were LV 5. Interestingly enough there were four other ants that are ‘special’ aside from Tsuwo, they were all LV 10 and had unique classes.

Makes me feel left behind.. I’m still LV 1, but I’m a queen. So if I were to be LV 10 I’d be the strongest… statistically. In total there were 1,006 ants, which is very small in comparison to my world’s ants population. Then again… considering our actual size, our number would make sense and we would be considered a big colony because now humans consider us a natural predator and it's possible that they hunt us down to control our numbers. Hmm.. could I check their statuses too..?

Name: Tsuwo

Race: Fire Ant

Class: Hardened Soldier

LV 10  

HP: 1,500/1,500 (green)

MP: 200/200 (blue)

SP: 1,000/1,000 (orange)

Offense: 1,700 Defense: 1,200 Magic: 300 

Skills (16):

[Hard Skin LV 7] [Strength LV 7] [Life LV 5] [Command LV 4] [Accuracy LV 5] [Touch Sensory LV 5] [Smell Sensory LV 5] [Vision LV 3] [Movement LV 7] [Intelligence LV 5] [Fire-Breath LV 5] [Tactics LV 5] [Resistance: Fire LV 7] [Bite LV 7] [Intimedate LV 7] [Guard LV 7] [Retaliate LV 7]

Holy moly, Tsuwo you bad’ant -- get it? -- Well she definitely has strength with little weaknesses. She’s catered towards the offensive and most likely the one to do a lot of physical DPS. A hard-hitter with a fair amount of agility, and defense. Basically, all-round good stats. [Retaliate LV 7] maybe a skill that allows her to take punishment while dishing it out tenfold? It would explain her scars. She’s the embodiment of a warrior after all, I’m glad I gave her a name to accompany all that bad’ant’ery. Her name is implemented on the status screen, so I assume I can name all the other ants since they don’t have any names either. I wonder if naming them gives them some sort of stat increase? I didn’t feel weird or get some notation when naming Tsuwo… guess I’ll have to find that out sometime.

Next was [Base], it showed a 2D platformer view of the ant hill along with cute little icons of the ants buzzing around in the hill. Interestingly enough, I can highlight each ant in groups or one at a time. It was not long until I discovered that we had a couple different stations running. Oddly enough we had a treasury, a garden, and a laboratory. I also found options to build other things within and even outside our ant hill. Which I couldn’t do because text came up saying ‘Insufficient Resources’ and showed what I was missing. 

Steele leaves? Pampo sticks? Argo Scales?? Cauzo Claws?? Krail Strings?? Okay, sounds like someone just desperately tried coming up with unique names for materials, but failed miserably.

Looking at the last option, [Map] only shows where I’ve been and since I’ve been born, just twenty minutes ago, all I can see is the ant hill from an overview. Rest of the map is black. 

I probably have to go explore if I wanna expand this map because right now it’s useless. 

The neat little feature is I can zoom in and out of the map which in turn gives a little more detail about the area the closer I zoom. Zooming in as far as I could, I was able to zoom into the ant hill and see the details of the passageway I’ve walked through and such. 

This would really be helpful in dungeon crawling or underground areas. If I can zoom this much, explorers and adventurers would kill for this type of power. Strangely enough… It's not listed as one of my skills, same with this menu screen. Does that mean that this menu screen and the ability to zoom this much in [Map] is common for everyone?

This time I zoomed out as far as I could. It stopped once the area that I am currently in became a dot in a sea of black. 

Holy, Holy, Holy! This place is way beyond huge, sort of feels like looking at a map when you first spawn in, like that one game where you use blocks to build and find diamonds to survive. 

At the top left of the map was a line of weird symbols. 

Of course just like any other fantasy world people get flung into, there’s gonna be unfamiliar text, but somehow it’s readable. 

The symbols read: Celestia. 

So I’m guessing this world is called Celestia, sounds ominous, I hope I’m not in a world that is controlled by religion and I have to fight some tyrannic church or mad gods or something. Whiich is oddly specific, I think I might have read that somewhere. 

After a bit of fidgeting around with the menu and all it’s options I couldn’t seem to find a ‘Log Out’ option or anything close to that. Breaking the silence, Tsuwo calls out to me. 

“My queen, Ariki, is everything alright? Shall I call assistance? We do have an excellent healer that can soothe any pain.” 

“No, no, no it’s all fine I was just very uh... into my thoughts. I apologize if it made you worry for my safety.” 

In Tsuwo’s point of view she heard Ariki screaming, scuttling around, a brief silence before flying around and crashing onto the floor then firing a flame laser blowing a hole into the wall followed by more silence in a span of ten minutes. Tsuwo worried that Ariki was in agonizing pain from something after being born and was taking it all out in the room. She was afraid of angering her even further if she intervened, so she waited till it blew over. 

She probably thought I was having a ‘time of the month’ moment. Wait, ants don’t have that or do they?? 

Having nothing but questions upon questions on my mind I decided to explore the ant hill and meet the four other special ants. 

“Well uh actually, I would love to meet the healer. Does she happen to be in the laboratory?”

“Yes, she helps us by creating new things and gives us items that can heal our wounds. She is very smart.”

So this ant is supposedly a healer too along with being some sort of scientist? Pretty odd an ant colony such as ours would need a scientist, then again common sense and logic probably doesn’t apply that much in this world. It probably has to do with the “class” system. It’s very much like a virtual reality game or a VRMMO. Only difference is I’m an ant, not a human and I don’t remember putting on some VR helmet before dying and being shoved into this world. Or maybe I am actually in a coma and some scientists plunged my consciousness in another world to keep me from dying while being their lab rat for their wicked experiments… Hmmm any more of this thinking I’d probably get into trouble.

“I’m ready when you are.”

“Of course my queen Ariki, I’ll lead the way.” 

Tsuwo guided me through the different passageways leading to the upper levels of the dome. Finally reaching giant doors crudely made out of wood with no handles. It roughly covered most of the entrance, held in place by a vine-like plant sprouting from the wall on the left and right side. Tsuwo pushed right through holding the doors open for me, I nodded my thanks walking in before her. The doors swiftly swung back into place after Tsuwo came in. Inside lead a tall long hallway connecting to an open chamber. Lined across the walls were strange symbols along with various objects scattered across the floor. Some of them resembled parts of certain insects, others were random made knicknacks, and the rest were leaves and flowers of different kinds. A strange scent filled the air and sounds of bubbling and crackling came from the end of the hallway. 

This is like some typical mad scientist’s lair, she may be a healer, but I do hope it doesn’t come with some quirky life threatening side effects. 

Continuing down carefully stepping over the mess with Tsuwo in tow. 

Bang! Boom! Fssshhhh!