Chapter Three – The Ant Nest – An Unknown Guest's Declaration
The instincts of the insectoid beings began to scream.
A ceaseless,silent alarm blared through their hive-mind the moment they sensed the intrusion of a being whose very scent was saturated with murderous intent.
The aura radiating from that being surpassed anything they had ever felt—a cold,oppressive pressure that made the very air feel heavy and still.
Yet, their own killing intent towards this intruder was high, a primal, territorial rage that overrode their nascent fear.
The being in question had black hair, one purple eye and one red, and pale, almost bloodless skin.
His clothes were covered in dried blood and torn in places,revealing glimpses of bare skin.
He appeared to be a youth of about sixteen,undeniably handsome in a sharp, severe way, but his eyes were filled with a bottomless well of contempt as he stared at the creatures before him.
[Uchiha Sasuke] had entered the ant nest.
After a few scant minutes of traversal,he had arrived at this place.
The first thing he did was look at the ant-human hybrid creatures.
His gaze held a flicker of undisguised disgust,a rare emotional leakage.
But in the next moment, he saw something that made his eyes narrow into slits, releasing a wave of cold, focused killing intent that washed over the chittering horde.
Human bodies.
Dismembered.
Scattered everywhere.
They didn't look like they had been torn apart in battle or by brute force.
Some parts appeared…gnawed upon. Consumed.
The bodies of the humans present—men,women—were strewn about like refuse.
But what made[Sasuke]'s lip curl in even deeper revulsion was the sight of several small forms among them. Children.
A pile of corpses, a charnel house assembled by insects.
The sight,the smell of iron, decay, and something sweetly foul, hit him in a wave.
In that very instant, one of the ant soldiers lunged at [Sasuke].
It was a giant soldier,standing three meters tall, armored in a carapace that resembled polished black stone, its pincers like shearing claws capable of cutting through steel.
For any normal person,seeing such an attack would trigger a desperate attempt to evade.
But at the moment the attack was launched, the ant soldier's arm was already severed at the joint.
A clean,purple-chakra-enhanced slice from [Sasuke]'s hand, moving faster than sight, produced a sharp SHING-THK.
The severed limb clattered to the ground.
In the following microsecond,the soldier's head flew from its shoulders, a surprised, alien look freezing in its multifaceted eyes before it hit the earth with a wet thud.
[Uchiha Sasuke] stepped over the twitching corpse, crushing a chitinous leg under his sandal with a decisive crunch.
He looked at the assembled mass of ants with pure,unadulterated hatred.
His initial plan had been to discover if these creatures could help him find a way back to his world.
But the moment he saw the collection of corpses—the evidence of consumption,of a hive that preyed on humans—he confirmed one thing with absolute, icy clarity.
—I will have to exterminate these creatures before I find my way back. This is certain. —
Having solidified this decision, he raised his hand.
Sparks of electricity,not blue like the Chidori, but a darker, more sinister purple-black, crackled around his fingertips with a vicious zzt-zzt-zap sound.
He performed a series of quick, precise hand seals—his fingers a blur—then lifted his hand towards the cavernous ceiling of the nest.
Pattern: Lightning. Heavenly Thunder Spears.
From his outstretched palm, [Sasuke]'s chakra transformed.
His arm seemed to become the focal point for a gathering storm.Dozens, then hundreds, of crackling spears of condensed lightning took shape in the air around him, humming with a deadly, high-pitched screeeeee.
They weren't random bolts;they were projectiles, shaped like jagged arrows of pure annihilation.
In a single, devastating release, he unleashed them.
FWOOM-SH-SH-SH-SH-KRAKAKAKA-BOOM!
The storm of lightning arrows rained down upon the ant soldiers who were now surging towards him in a mindless, chittering wave.
The sound was apocalyptic—a continuous,deafening cacophony of sizzling flesh, exploding chitin, and the screams of creatures dying in agony.
In moments, the advancing front of the ant army was transformed.
They became shredded,smoking husks.
Limbs were sheared off,torsos were pierced through with smoldering holes, heads vaporized.
Extreme-degree burns,black and crackling, appeared all over their bodies.
Their physical defenses,formidable against conventional weapons, were utterly useless against the concentrated, chakra-forged lightning.
They died en masse,burning without any ability to defend themselves.
Their eyes—those human-insect hybrid eyes—emitted silent screams of terror.
The human emotions they had inherited from their grotesque fusion had granted them a capacity for fear that pure insects would lack,and that fear was magnified a thousandfold in this moment of their horrific demise.
With every lightning spear that fell upon them,dropped from the hand of [Uchiha Sasuke] like the wrath of a disdainful god, their brief, monstrous lives were snuffed out in the most brutal way imaginable.
After the massacre at the nest's entrance, [Sasuke] took light, almost soundless steps forward.
The only noise was the softshuff of his sandals on the sticky, ichor-covered floor and the occasional crunch of a stray piece of shattered carapace.
He activated his Sharingan fully, the crimson tomoe spinning rapidly, and peered into the vast, pulsating structure of the nest.
He tried to locate the source of the strange energy he could now sense clearly.
It wasn't chakra.
He didn't know what it was,but this energy felt more unstable, darker, more malicious than chakra.
Yet,to someone who was the embodiment of the Six Paths Sage's power, the sheer level of this energy was pitifully low.
It didn't even equal 20%of his current depleted strength.
This assessment filled him with disdain.
He didn't need to negotiate with vermin.
He transformed into a streak of crackling purple electricity—ZRRRT—and blasted deeper into the heart of the nest, a comet of death ready to kill every living thing in his path.
Conversation was off the table.
---
In another location, the Japanese S-Rank hunters were in a state of shock.
They had surveillance equipment—camera drones carried by small, silent aircraft—that allowed them to observe the scene. A scene none of the Korean hunters, who were also advancing towards the Ant Queen's nest, had witnessed yet.
[Goto Ryuji], the S-Rank hunter who aspired to become an international-level hunter, took a deep, shuddering breath as he watched the ant army being systematically eradicated by a single individual.
None of the other hunters beside him had any information on this person.
But finally,through the enhanced audio feed, they managed to catch his voice as he spoke, his words clear amidst the din of destruction.
"I will eradicate every living thing in this nest."
The words that left the mouth of [Uchiha Sasuke] were in Japanese.
Therefore,the Japanese team understood him perfectly.
[Goto Ryuji]'s gaze sharpened, his eyes glued to the monitor showing the pale, fierce-faced youth. He barked at his assistant, his voice tight with a mixture of awe and alarm.
"Who the hell is this bastard?How can he possess such power? How is it we don't know about a hunter of this caliber in Japan? And how did he get here? Tell me, quickly!"
Every question felt like a knife being twisted in the minds of the other Japanese S-Rank hunters present.
Unconsciously,they all shook their heads.
They knew nothing.
They had no idea who this man—no,this boy, who didn't even look like a grown man, who appeared to be about sixteen himself—could be.
All this information was visual,available to everyone watching from their screens as they monitored both the nest and the advancing Korean hunters.
Meanwhile, the leader of the Korean Hunter Association was doing the same thing.
But unlike the Japanese hunters,the Association Chairman's eyes were wide with surprise for a different reason.
"This hunter… he's definitely not in any of the files we obtained. Where did he come from?"
The Chairman of the Korean Hunter Association spoke his thoughts aloud, his voice a low rumble of confusion and concern.
His assistant,a woman with swift fingers, was already inputting a flurry of commands into her computer.
She zoomed the drone's image in on the stranger's face,then activated translation software on the captured audio.
The result came back swiftly.
The language being used was identified:Japanese.
The translation of his most recent declaration appeared on a secondary screen for the strongest hunter in Korea to read.
"I will exterminate this nest without leaving a single thing moving."
The language was unmistakably, perfectly Japanese.
Yet,all the personnel around the Chairman were frantically cross-referencing databases, checking if this hunter was part of the official Japanese delegation or covered under the special agreement for the Jeju Island operation.
Search after search yielded nothing.
No records.No identification. No guild affiliation. He was a ghost.
Finally, the Chairman, feeling a profound sense of wrongness, of a variable spiraling out of control, gave an order.
His voice was grave,cutting through the tense silence of the command center.
"Contact the Korean hunters on the ground. Tell them to be extremely cautious, to observe before engaging. There may be an unknown guest in their path. One we know nothing about."
The message was sent, a ripple of apprehension moving from the command center towards the battlefield, where two groups of elite hunters were converging on a nest that was becoming the stage for a one-man, otherworldly purge.
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End of Chapter.
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The hunt becomes a spectacle, and a storm named Sasuke declares war on the hive. Thank you for reading, and for your continued curiosity about where this violent, bewildering path leads! Your engagement is the true spark in this strange new world.
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