The ant colony had not been raiding.
This was, in the context of the history of chimera ant colonies, unusual. Colonies fed through their host population. They spread outward from their nest, consumed what they found, moved on. Mass disappearances. Local agricultural devastation. The kind of event that eventually attracted the attention of military or Hunter Association response teams, usually after the damage was severe enough that response was mostly documentation.
Tserriednich had thought about this problem before becoming an ant.
He had considered it the way he considered all logistical problems: from the position of someone who would prefer the situation to remain under his control and was willing to invest resources in that preference. A Chimera Ant colony that raided human settlements would attract military response. Military response would involve weapons. Modern weapons, applied at scale, were a threat to anything that could be identified and targeted, regardless of how much Nen that thing contained. He had therefore arranged for the colony's nutritional requirements to be met through careful supply management rather than opportunistic consumption.
The queen had been fed. The guards had been fed. The army had been fed. Nobody had asked questions about mass disappearances because there had not been mass disappearances.
He had thought this was clever. He now recognized it as a contribution to his own current predicament, since the well-fed and protected environment had produced two ant kings instead of one, and he was the second one, and the first one was standing six meters away looking at him with the specific attention of something that has identified an object of interest and is deciding what to do about it.
The tail moved.
Chelich stepped aside before it arrived, which was possible because she had felt it coming through the En she had been quietly maintaining since she crawled out of the wall, and moved into a position slightly behind and to the left of Meruem, which was not a strategically comfortable position but was better than where the tail had just been.
There were things to discuss. She would rather discuss them upright.
"Before you decide anything," she said, "let me show you something more interesting than hitting me."
She produced a cup of water from a shelf in the room, where the ants had accumulated human objects with the specific collecting instinct of creatures that had processed human genetic material and retained the habit without the context. She set it on the floor. She placed a leaf on the surface.
"This is called Water Divination," she said. "It tells you what kind of Nen user you are. Watch."
Her own Water Divination had been performed by Theta, years ago. The result then had been entropy reversal, which had turned the water to vapor and left the leaf curling at the edges from the thermal displacement. She did it now and got a similar result, calibrated to her current body: the water temperature rose, the leaf browned, the surface of the water moved in a way that violated the room's air currents.
"Specialization," she said. "The category outside the standard six. The one that produces abilities that don't follow normal rules."
Neferpitou had been maintaining Doctor Blythe's repairs on the queen throughout this entire conversation, a feat of divided attention that Chelich catalogued under useful information. She glanced at the cup and the leaf and the browned surface with the expression of someone who found a puzzle more interesting than most things.
"Can I try?"
She set another cup down, placed a leaf, and concentrated.
The water boiled immediately, the surface breaking into a full rolling boil without any heat source. The leaf did not just brown: it reduced to ash in the time it took to exhale. The cup itself, which was ceramic, cracked from the thermal differential.
"Specialization also," Chelich noted. "Though your expression is considerably more dramatic than mine."
Neferpitou looked at the ash with the satisfied expression of someone who has confirmed something.
Shaiapouf was next, because he had been watching with the restrained curiosity of someone who finds intellectual exercises acceptable when they are clearly leading somewhere useful. He reformed his head from the distributed miniature selves he had retreated into when Chelich's cannon had found it, and set up his own cup.
Nothing moved. Nothing changed temperature. Nothing happened to the leaf.
His body dissolved.
Not violently. He simply broke apart into a dense cluster of smaller versions of himself, each one independently mobile, which then collected back into a single Shaiapouf, who looked at the results with the expression of someone who expected this.
"Manipulation," Chelich said.
Youpi did his. The leaf moved. Not dramatically. It shifted position as though nudged by an absent finger, once, twice, and then was still.
"Transmutation," Chelich said. "You change the quality of your aura rather than its quantity or direction."
Youpi looked at the leaf with the mild interest of someone who has received information and filed it in a category labeled not currently relevant.
Meruem had been watching this sequence from a standing position with his arms folded and an expression that communicated something between assessment and mild impatience. He looked at the water cup. He looked at the leaf.
He placed the leaf. He looked at the water.
The leaf did not move. The water volume stayed constant. The cup did not crack.
The color changed.
Not gradually. The water turned from clear to gold and then from gold to deep red, the specific saturated red of burning clouds at the last moment before dark, dense and total, as though the water had become something else entirely while retaining the shape of water.
"Emission," Chelich said, and then did not say anything else for a moment, because the implications of Emission type in a body of that Nen density were being processed.
Meruem looked at the colored water, looked at his hands, and apparently decided the demonstration was complete. He produced a Ren.
It was not the Ren of someone learning. It was not the effortful expansion of someone pushing their aura past its comfortable boundary. It was a Ren the way the sun is a sun: simply present, simply itself, filling the room with a pressure that had no ceiling the room was built to accommodate. The division commanders who had been standing against the walls since the queen's treatment began slid down those walls and became horizontal.
All of them simultaneously.
Chelich held her ground through the application of stubbornness and the defensive aura she had been quietly maintaining since she got out of the rubble.
Meruem applied Ten. The Ren contracted back to the surface of his body with a clean precision.
Then he removed it entirely. The room lost all awareness of his presence. He stood in the middle of the space and was, from an aura perspective, absent. Chelich focused everything she had into Gyo and could find him only as a faint, geometric outline, like trying to see glass against glass.
The aura returned to his left fist. Then his right foot. Then his tail. Moving between attachment points with the fluid comfort of someone who has been doing this for years.
It had been approximately ten minutes since she had explained what Water Divination was.
Chelich watched three Nen bullets orbit the Ant King's head at different speeds and felt a specific emotion she had not expected to feel in her new life: genuine unease.
She had anticipated talent. She had spent considerable time in the womb absorbing what this body represented and what the Ant King beside her represented. She had made peace with the power differential. What she had not adequately anticipated was the speed of the learning curve. She had wanted to keep En for later, as a final demonstration of complexity, a technique to reveal when she needed to demonstrate continued value.
Meruem's En expanded outward from his body quietly, like breathing, and covered the room, and retreated.
She kept her face entirely neutral.
"You look surprised," Meruem said, "that I learned quickly."
"I look nothing," Chelich said. "I don't have the facial architecture for it yet."
"Your aura changed. I can read aura." He looked down at her. "These techniques were in your memory. You know the human beings who could do them. Are any of them comparable to me?"
"In terms of raw output and learning speed?" She considered how to phrase the next part accurately. "No. The gap is significant."
"Then your claim earlier, that human beings are terrible, requires revision."
"It requires specification." She found a surface at approximately sitting height and used it. "More than nine out of ten human beings have never heard of Nen. The systems that govern human society, the governments, the laws, the economies, the resource networks, the people who hold actual political power over billions of lives, almost none of them are Nen users. They govern anyway. They give orders that get followed anyway. A Nen user of significant capability who walks into that structure and declares themselves its replacement discovers very quickly that capability is not the same as authority, and that authority is backed by things that are not Nen."
Shaiapouf made a sound that communicated his opinion of this without requiring words.
"You're thinking about guns," Chelich said. "You're thinking that conventional weapons are toys compared to what this body can do, which is accurate for individual encounters at close range. You're not thinking about what happens when a government decides that something needs to stop existing and assigns industrial-scale resources to making that happen. Volume. Sustained application. Coordination. The systematic mobilization of millions of humans who don't individually need to be Nen users to collectively produce outcomes that Nen users cannot simply absorb and continue."
Youpi was scratching his arm in the way of someone who has been asked to think about abstract problems and would prefer a concrete enemy to hit.
"The queen knows this," Chelich said. "She knows what humans are capable of when they decide something needs to stop. You could ask her directly what her time in human custody felt like. She was imprisoned and managed and fed on a schedule and her production cycles were monitored and logged. She was an asset in a facility. Every single human in that facility was weaker than the weakest ant in this room." She paused. "That's the point I'm making."
Meruem said nothing.
He had been in the womb for months. He had not been born with memories the way Chelich had been born with memories, but he had been in proximity to the queen throughout the queen's captivity, receiving her presence through the biological connection of gestation. He had not been paying attention to her emotional state at the time, because he had been occupied with his own development and with assessing the entity on his other side.
Neferpitou tilted her head with the focused curiosity she applied to everything.
"Meruem-sama," she said, with the gentle precision of someone who wants to correct a record without being imprecise, "was asking you, I believe, specifically about learning speed. Not the comparison of physical capabilities." She glanced between them. "The question was about acquiring Nen techniques quickly. Not about whether humans are individually stronger."
The room processed this.
"Oh," Chelich said.
"Hm," Meruem said. He looked at his hands again.
Chelich looked at Shaiapouf, whose head was fully restored and whose expression was the specific expression of someone who finds the current situation of two ant kings having a definitional argument privately unbearable and publicly containable.
She looked at Youpi, who had found something to punch and was now hitting the wall intermittently with what appeared to be genuine personal satisfaction.
She looked at Neferpitou, whose surgical construct was still methodically working through the queen's injuries, and who was watching everything else with the fascinated attention she gave to phenomena she had not categorized yet.
"Are there any devices in this building," Chelich said, "that can connect to the internet? Computers. Phones. Any kind of network access." She looked at the room's assembled occupants. "That is what I need to show you next. Not what individual humans can do. What all of them together have built and continue to build and what that means for any entity that intends to exist in the same world as it."