A hunting party of big-headed ants is marching.
This hunting team is organized according to the organization of the Angel King's army. There are fifty ants in one team, including twenty soldier ants and thirty worker ants. There is also a male ant as the commander.
Male ants did not often participate in production activities in the past, but hunting is quite special and has a certain nature of military training. Therefore, unmarried male ants often join hunting teams to accumulate military experience.
When the protagonist first traveled to this world, he participated in a hunt. At that time, he commanded ten ants, but unfortunately encountered the top predator-the mantis and almost died.
In order to prevent other male ants from making the same mistake, the protagonist now requires the male ants to be accompanied by a whole team of fifty ants when they go hunting. Such a hunting team is already a force that cannot be underestimated. Very few single insects can threaten the heavily protected male ants.
This leading male ant is still very young, having just hatched. He has not participated in the wedding flight within the Angel King's legion and is considered to be underage. There are a total of fifty such young male ants this year. He is just an ordinary member. He has not left an impression on the protagonist, nor has he been named by the protagonist.
Compared with other male ants, his size is slightly larger, but only a little. If you are not standing side by side with other male ants, it is difficult to see the difference. However, this is already his most unique feature, so let’s just call him “Nobita”.
The core of the hunting team is the soldier ants. Among the twenty soldier ants, half are retired soldiers and half are reserve soldiers. Retired soldiers are often older or have physical disabilities, so they don't move very fast and even stagger a little.
But these retired soldiers are the core fighting force of the hunting team. They have fought in the mountains of corpses and seas of blood, and have rich experience and tenacious fighting spirit. Even if you are no longer suitable to serve in the Angel King's Legion due to physical reasons, you can still contribute your combat experience here.
Many of the young reserve warriors emerge from pupa only after the beginning of spring. They must first practice in the hunting team for a period of time. After learning from the experience of retired warriors, those who pass will wait for a suitable opportunity to join the army as substitutes.
In recent years, the Legion of the Divine Envoy King has been expanding very rapidly, and there have been a lot of battle losses, so it often needs a large amount of fresh blood. This is also the reason why the hunting team is organized according to the military - the hunting team is the training base for the army's reserve soldiers.
In order to produce a large number of soldier ants and worker ants, after spring, the queen ants, who had rested for the whole winter, once again adjusted the hormones in their bodies. Their abdomens expanded little by little at a speed visible to the naked eye, and countless ant eggs seemed to be produced from an assembly line. , are constantly transported to the nursery by nursery ants for incubation.
The duty of the many worker ants in the hunting team is to serve as subordinates to the soldier ants. During hunting, they can work together and use their mandibles to contain the prey. After the hunt is over, they also have to carry the prey, leaving the soldier ants free to conserve energy and respond to emergencies.
Today, the goal of this hunting team is the south of "Dongyang City".
"Dongyang City" can reach the hilly area where "South City" is located all the way south. The two places are separated by more than half a day's journey. Of course, this is measured by the speed of ants. A human can run back and forth between two ant nests in a few minutes.
Between the two nests, there is an open area dotted with sparse trees, lush shrubs and equally lush herbaceous vegetation.
This lush open space is a paradise for plants, and even more so for insects. A large number of different species of insects eat, rest, reproduce, and hide in it. Even a saline-alkali land with sparse vegetation, the only source of supplementary salt for arthropods that are not picky about bitter alkali salts, is equally vibrant.
Due to the long distance, none of the hunting teams considered this place as their destination at first.
However, as the hunting team swept away the vicinity of "Dongyang City", there were few traces of insects in the suburbs where the vegetation was not originally dense. Insects either become food for ants, or they find that this place is not suitable for staying for a long time and flee.
The only thing that can live a prosperous life near "Dongyang City" is the bees in the big white poplar trees. However, the protagonist has been thinking about this place for a long time. If he hadn't been concerned about the combat effectiveness of the bees, he would have sent troops to attack the hive.
Turning back to the topic, precisely because of the shortage of prey in the suburbs of "Dongyang City", the hunting team had to travel longer distances to hunt.
This is also a problem faced by many large-scale ant colonies that rely on hunting as their food source. The way African army ants solve this problem is to keep migrating. After consuming all the prey in one place, they move to another food-rich area to continue hunting. This style is very similar to the primitive people of the wandering hunting tribes in primitive societies.
However, there are too many bottles and cans in "Dongyang City", which is obviously not suitable for moving, and the equally important source of food-the farmland for growing crops cannot be moved. Therefore, in order to obtain more prey, the hunting team had no choice but to expand the hunting scope.
Against this background, the hunting team decided to head south. This is destined to be a relatively arduous journey. It takes the hunting team half a day just to go back and forth, leaving them only a short time to actually hunt.
If they couldn't get back to "Dongyang City" in time, they would have to spend the night in a nearby temporary settlement.
These temporary footholds are the fortresses and material transfer stations built by the protagonist when he was conquering the parasitic ants that were now entrenched in the hills and known as "Southern City". After the war subsided, a small number of ants were left stationed at these strongholds for messengers and transport teams traveling between the two places to rest and avoid danger.
Because hunting requires a lot of energy and may not be able to return to the nest for the night, these members of the hunting team set off with a full stomach.
The male ant walked in the middle and front of the team, with ten young reserve soldier ants guarding him. In addition to the young soldier ants, there were also two older retired soldier ants serving as his guards and teachers.
The other eight older soldier ants were scattered around the entire team. They not only had to serve as scouts, but they also had to restrain the worker ants in the team to prevent them from falling behind or getting lost.
The hunting party headed south, passing under the leaves of various vegetation, over dirt and half-rotted leaf litter. The conscientious older soldier ants leave short-acting pheromones at every eye-catching landmark to guide the route back to the nest.
Male ants and young soldier ants learn and comprehend on their own from the practices of older soldier ants. They have all received information packages of this knowledge, but only by deepening their impressions in practice can they become qualified commanders and warriors.
In the beginning, other hunting or gathering teams could be encountered from time to time, but as they went further south, sightings of the same race became increasingly rare.
