The chimera ant colony operated on a logic that had been refined over more generations than anyone had bothered to count.
The queen bred. That was her function and her purpose and the organizing principle of her entire existence. She bred an ant king, and the ant king's guards, and the division commanders and corps commanders who would serve both, and the soldier ants who would fill out the hierarchy below them. When the ant king was born, he left with his three guards. The queen recovered, replenished, and began the next cycle. She was not a ruler. She was a factory with maternal instincts and the specific dignity of something that has never questioned its own role.
This particular cycle had been interrupted by Pariston, who had the soul of an experiment that had gotten away from its designer, and by Tserriednich, who had contributed funding and requirements and the specific ambition of someone who considered "customized personal army" a reasonable medium-term goal.
The queen had done what queens did.
She had also, as a secondary output, produced Chelich.
Meruem was born first, in the way that things of his particular quality tend to be born: completely, absolutely, without the apologetic gradation that characterizes ordinary arrivals. He stood on the floor of the former human building that the ants had restructured into something they considered appropriate, and he looked at the three guards kneeling before him, and at the division commanders rushing toward the queen's position with the panic of creatures whose entire operational hierarchy had just become contingent, and he felt, with the clean precision of a mind encountering itself for the first time, what he was.
He was the Ant King.
The awareness was not arrogance. It was taxonomy. He was the largest thing in the room, and the strongest thing in the room, and the thing all the other things were organized around. This was simply the shape of the situation, the way a mountain is simply the shape of the geology.
"I'm hungry," he said. "Bring me food."
A turtle-aspect division commander, whose instinct for hierarchy had not quite caught up with the reality of the hierarchy now present in the room, said something conciliatory about checking on the queen first.
Meruem's tail moved.
The division commander's head ceased to exist as a discrete object.
"I'm hungry," Meruem said again. "Bring me food."
Neferpitou rose from her knee, considered the division commanders' collective paralysis with the mild interest of someone watching a documentary, and said to Meruem, "The food has been prepared. Please follow us." She turned to the cluster of attendants near the queen with the pleasant expression she used for all interactions. "The king has been born. The three of us answer to the king. The queen's condition is not our concern."
The division commanders absorbed this information.
"What about my orders?"
The voice was not Meruem's. The pitch was different, higher and younger, with the specific quality of someone who is aware they are at a disadvantage and has decided to proceed anyway.
The room looked.
From the queen's wreckage, from the blood and the aftermath of birth and the structural catastrophe that the process had made of her lower body, a figure emerged. It was approximately a third of Meruem's size. It had the general architecture of a chimera ant, the blended hereditary features, the specific density of something bred rather than born. It wiped its face with one small arm, looked at the blood it found there, and looked up at Neferpitou.
"I am also an ant king," it said, with the tone of someone stating a geological fact. "Does that mean you can follow my orders?"
Meruem's tail moved again.
The figure was gone before the tail completed its arc. The wall behind where the figure had been took the hit and produced a crater, and the figure produced its absence from the expected location, and the wall and the figure both registered the interaction with their respective structural properties. The figure continued through several layers of reinforced concrete before stopping.
Youpi scratched his head. "So. Two kings?"
"There is only one king," Shaiapouf said, flatly and immediately, with the specific conviction of someone who considers the question upsetting.
"The queen produced two ant kings in one litter," Neferpitou said, in the tone of a scientist recording a result. "This is what happened. We can discuss what it means or we can acknowledge it."
Silence from Meruem.
From the hole in the wall, a small figure crawled back out. Its cheek was beginning to swell. It examined the damage in a way that conveyed more surprise than pain, and the surprise was of the technical variety, the surprise of someone recalibrating a previously held assumption.
Tserriednich had been shot, stabbed, reversed, reversed again, bombed, reversed again, and then destroyed from altitude by an entity that had built the entire preceding sequence specifically toward that moment. He had died. He had then been reincarnated into a womb and shared it for an extended period with the most overwhelming Nen presence he had ever encountered, survived that, been born without warning, and was now receiving his new body's first field test by being hit through multiple walls by his new sibling.
The ant body had not cracked.
He touched his face and felt the swelling and noted, with the specific pleasure of a man who has always considered fragility a character flaw, that the ant body was simply not fragile. His human body, in retrospect, had been extraordinarily easy to destroy. He had spent considerable effort protecting it. This body seemed to operate on different structural assumptions.
Perhaps being obliterated from altitude had been necessary.
"Neferpitou," he said, standing up from the rubble with the composure of someone who does this regularly. "I am ordering you to heal the queen. She is our mother. Both of us." He looked at Meruem. "Brother."
Neferpitou looked at Meruem.
Meruem said nothing.
Neferpitou processed the command. She looked at the queen, whose body was doing its best to fail at everything simultaneously. She looked at the small figure that had just crawled out of a structural wall without apparent lasting damage. She made an assessment.
"As you wish," she said.
She rose from the ground and the aura around her shifted into the shape of her healing ability, the construct she had developed under the particular inspiration of whatever had happened in the womb. Doctor Blythe extended its complex instruments and began the patient, methodical work of making the queen's body function again.
The division commanders, watching this, reached a collective state of profound emotional relief.
Tserriednich watched and felt satisfied in the specific way of someone who has correctly identified the available leverage and applied it at the right moment. He was, by any objective measure, weaker than every named entity in this room. He had the queen. He had, by extension, the army that the queen commanded. Not because they feared him. Because he had saved her, and they were built to care about her survival in ways that Meruem was not, and that disparity was a resource.
He intended to be very careful with it.
"You," Meruem said.
Tserriednich looked up.
Meruem was looking at him with the cold, focused attention he had felt through the wall of the womb. Up close it was considerably more concentrated.
"Show me what that was. The field you extended earlier." He produced a sphere of Nen in his palm, small, dense, a demonstration of capability rather than a threat. "Explain how you did it."
The ball sat in Meruem's hand with the self-containment of a star in a bottle.
Tserriednich looked at it. He looked at Meruem. He looked at the holes in the wall behind him, one of which he had personally created from the inside.
"I'll show you," he said. "And more than that. There are things I know that nothing in this colony knows. Things about what humans are capable of, and how, and what it costs them, and what they'll do to protect it." He held Meruem's gaze. "That's considerably more valuable than one technique."
"If you refuse to answer," Meruem said, with the patience of something that has already decided and is simply informing, "you will die."
"If you kill me before you know what I know," Tserriednich said, "you'll have less information than you currently have. I don't think that's what you want."
A silence.
The queen's breathing stabilized as Neferpitou's instruments worked through the last of the critical repairs. The division commanders made themselves very quiet. Shaiapouf had been watching the exchange with the expression of someone who considers a conversation beneath the dignity of the participants and intends to say so.
He laughed.
It was the laugh of someone who has made an aesthetic judgment and found it unfavorable. A dismissive, ornate, theatrical laugh that communicated, without words, what he thought of small ant girls in rubble making arguments.
Tserriednich pointed.
The aura cannon came from the space between her extended finger and Shaiapouf's head, and the distance was short, and Shaiapouf's head, which had been laughing, stopped performing that function.
The room went very quiet.
Neferpitou paused her repairs and looked at the result with scientific interest.
Youpi looked at the space where Shaiapouf's head had been, then at Tserriednich, then back at the space.
Meruem said nothing. His expression had not changed.
Tserriednich lowered her finger.
"Shall we continue?" she said.