Filled with the joy of wiping out the last main force of the enemy and most of its viable forces, the protagonist sets foot on a pass strewn with corpses, stepping on the remains of losers and passing through the twists and turns. Then, look into the distance.
There, on the lower slopes of the hills, you can see the last remaining few parasitic ants near the rippling blue lake and the narrow shore covered with black mud.
But what almost shocked the protagonist was that these parasitic ants were actually floating on the water.
Although the distance is far away and the protagonist cannot see the details in the distance, a large number of dark ants are spread out on the lake like a thin blanket, rising and falling with the waves, and slowly moving away from the shore.
The protagonist was shocked. He thought that the parasitic ants had reached a desperate situation and could not escape even if they had wings, but they actually escaped into the water. They can actually swim? The protagonist is full of doubts.
The protagonist immediately sent out a messenger and asked the flying knights to quickly take off for reconnaissance. He wanted to find out why the enemy was able to wade into the water.
The soldiers of the God Envoy King's Legion certainly cannot swim, and they do not have the ability to chase down enemies on the water, but letting the already desperate enemies escape and finally resurrect in a corner is unacceptable to the protagonist at all costs.
The flying knights quickly flew over the protagonist's head, swooping down the hills with wings beating, passing over the lake at close range, and passing over the enemies that formed an ant carpet that undulated with the lake water.
On the lake with a wide view, the flying knights no longer have to worry about the enemy's ambush. They can lower their altitude at will and observe the enemy's movements at a very close distance.
The flying knight returned soon, and the protagonist couldn't wait to read the information package.
He saw that the remaining parasitic ants, less than three thousand, were forming a giant circular blanket, holding hands, entwining their feet, biting their mouths, intertwined with each other, and floating on the lake. With the breeze blowing, they were moving away from the lake shore and away from the pursuit of the God's Envoy King's army.
The outer edges of the ant carpet are composed of strong soldier ants and worker ants, while the relatively weak ants, the queen ants and parasitic fungi that need protection are placed in the middle of the ant carpet. The parasitic ants have discarded all their supplies, including eggs, larvae and pupae, on the shore of the lake, allowing them to be washed away by the water.
Seeing this scene, the protagonist was speechless. Under the pressure of survival, these ants jumped into the cold lake without hesitation, allowing fate to make the final judgment on them.
Big-headed ants should not be able to cross rivers in this way, but some ants, such as fire ants, have mastered this technique.
According to US media reports in 2015, South Carolina once suffered a major heavy rainstorm once in a thousand years. The precipitation in some areas has reached 610 mm. Small ponds turned into large lakes, creeks became rivers, and the water level of the Congaree River also dropped. reached the highest value since 1936. This has brought disaster to the fire ants living in the area.
But fire ants teamed up to form floating islands to escape the floods. When the water begins to flood the fire ant colony, they will take action. The worker ants will connect each other's legs and mouths together. In less than 2 minutes, the entire colony of red imported fire ants can form a floating structure like this. "Noah's Ark" until it drifted to a dry land.
The fire ants will move the queen and larvae to the center of the ark where the water cannot splash. The hairs all over the body of fire ants can trap enough air to prevent the ants at the bottom of the raft from being completely submerged.
Fire ants can live in a life raft for weeks, but they eventually have to reach dry land before they can resume life as a colony. In the water, fire ants face constant threats from predators, especially fish, which bite and eat the ants one by one. If too many ants are eaten, the entire raft may disintegrate.
Unexpectedly, parasitic ants are now self-taught and use their own buoyancy to build such an escape blanket. Although their ant blanket was small and it seemed that a large wave could completely destroy it, they also lacked experience and discarded a large amount of materials and ant eggs that could have been brought into the ant blanket. However, most parasitic ants did manage to escape.
The protagonist cannot let his subordinates desperately jump into the lake to pursue them. Not to mention the risks of doing so. Once they enter the water, they can only rely on the wind direction and current to make unpredictable movements. They may not be able to catch up with them at all. Parasitic ants that enter the water early.
But just letting the enemy escape like this makes the protagonist extremely unwilling.
The protagonist thought for a while and ordered the flying knights to attack the parasitic ants floating on the water that were temporarily unable to fight back.
According to the protagonist's plan, the flying knights carry the largest rocks they can carry, fly above the parasitic ant carpet, drop the rocks, and carry out the most primitive bombing of the enemy. Then they flew back to the shore to find new ammunition and continued the bombardment.
But this tactic soon proved to be ineffective.
If the flying knights want to pursue maximum damage, they have to carry the stones and fly to as high a height as possible. At this time, it is difficult for the flying knights to see the enemy's position clearly in their narrow field of vision, and the stones dropped from this height Under the interference of the air flow, trying to hit the already very small parasitic ant carpet is no less than a blind man trying to shoot a flying goose in the distance with a bow and arrow.
If the height is reduced to less than half a meter, the accuracy of bombing can be greatly improved, but at this height, rocks have no power at all. Even if it directly hits the parasitic ant, it means that the unlucky victim will briefly sink under the water, and he will soon rise to catch his companion in the ant blanket.
The most effective attack method in the bombing operation is when some rocks occasionally hit the edge of the ant blanket. The water splash will splash one or two unfortunate parasitic ants away from the large army. Some parasitic ants quickly return to the ground. In the ant blanket. Although some struggled hard, they were not good at swimming and gradually drifted away from the group under the combined action of wind and water. The fate of these outliers awaited, either being discovered and eaten by other insects, or they would be unable to swim due to water entering their stomata. Death from suffocation while breathing.
The bombing operation lasted for a while, but the effect was really not good. The endurance of the flying knights also reached the limit and they had to withdraw to rest. After a round of bombing, there were few results, and less than ten parasitic ants were forced out of the ant blanket.
The Angel King's Legion has already begun to collect the trophies abandoned by the parasitic ants on the shore of the lake. Ant eggs and ant pupae are both good things, and both living and dead ones have been taken away.
The protagonist is not in this mood. He can only watch the parasitic ant blanket floating further and further away from the tall rocks on the shore of the lake.
