Since the four walls were covered with sandy slopes, the gravel beneath her feet kept rolling down when the warrior of the Divine Envoy King climbed up. She went up three steps and then slid down two steps, as if she was going backwards on a slide.
The rolling gravel quickly fell to the bottom of the pit, like a long-awaited signal, awakening some terrifying existence.
Suddenly, the gravel at the bottom of the bunker started rolling like boiling water, as if the sky had changed dramatically before the devil was born, signaling an ominous arrival.
In an instant, a pair of long and sharp jaws suddenly pierced the sand and stretched into the air. The pair of jaws showed an earthy color similar to the sand, but the top of the jaws was sharp and retracted, which was a kind of blood. The dried reddish-brown color looks hideous and terrifying.
Immediately after the jaws appeared, there was a huge head, a head that was bigger than the combined body size of two or three Divine Envoy King warriors. The head is the same color as the antennae, and is so smooth that the protagonist can't even see where the bug's eyes are.
The jaw appeared extremely suddenly and disappeared quickly, like a fleeting illusion. But the climbing warrior of the God's Envoy King knew that this was a real monster. She had fallen back to the bottom of the sand pit and was being dragged downwards...
The protagonist recognizes such a monster and this difficult-to-climb sand pit - it is an "ant lion", an insect that is good at catching ants in traps, and the larvae of an ant fly.
The ant lion has a camouflage color the same as sand, its head is much smaller than its body, and it has a pair of large jaws. It walks backwards when moving on the ground, which is very strange.
The biggest characteristic of the ant lion in hunting is that it spins and drills down on the sand, creating a funnel-shaped trap in the sand. It hides under the sand at the bottom of the funnel and uses its large jaws to flick the sand outward. , making the surroundings of the funnel trap smooth, steep and densely covered with gravel. When ants or bugs crawl into the trap and are unable to escape for a while, they will be dragged into the sand by the ant lions and eaten.
Although the antlions have huge jaws, they do not chew their prey. Instead, like spiders, they suck up the juices from their prey and then throw away their shells.
The protagonist recognized his identity instantly and wanted to order the rescue of the warriors of the Envoy King who fell into the trap, but it was already too late.
The ant lion is extremely fast. Although the protagonist has good eyesight and can roughly see its appearance, most of the ants did not see what was happening at all.
After a flash of black shadow, the gravel at the bottom of the sand pit shook a few times. The abdomen of the warrior of the God's Envoy King was already half buried in the sand - she was bitten by the ant lion.
The warrior of the God's Envoy King struggled hard, trying to climb up, but the demonic power hidden under the gravel was even stronger. Within two seconds, the warrior of the God's Envoy King disappeared into the gravel, as if he had sunk into a swamp.
The protagonist looked around. The outside of [Hive City] was densely covered with large and small ant lion pits. Only a few winding and narrow roads in the middle could lead to [Hive City].
It seems that these ant lions do not naturally gather here, but are placed here by the red fire ant country as a guard force for [Hive City], which is why there is such an abnormal density. If the ant lions did this on their own, too dense a trap would starve the ant lions.
Indeed, one of the few insects that can be domesticated in the fire ant country is the ant lion. But if the ant lions pupate into nymphs, the fire ants cannot control them, so the ant lions are more like a semi-domesticated species.
These antlion eggs are collected by fire ants every year by sending their burrowing ant slave auxiliaries to the antlion laying sites, and then brought back to the nest for incubation. After hatching, the ant lions are placed around large nests such as [Hive City], and they dig holes to create traps.
Ants in the red fire ant country all know not to fall into these sand pit traps, otherwise no companions will be able to save you. Fire ants usually throw in dying or injured ants and raise these ant lions to prevent them from starving to death or escaping.
With sufficient food, these ant lions stay where they are and become the guardians of [Hive City]. They can be said to be the guardian beasts of the red fire ant country.
During the war with leaf-cutting ants, an army of leaf-cutting ants once came to [Hive City], but hundreds of thousands of troops suffered heavy losses in front of the ant lions. The corpses almost filled up these pits. In the end, the leaf-cutting ants The army could only retreat.
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The Angel King's army has returned to the starting point. They lost more than a dozen ants in the pit just now. Fortunately, they left early so that no more companions fell into the trap.
The protagonist had no idea that [Hive City] had this kind of defense mechanism before. He had never received information before, and even the "old heart" who was most familiar with the domestic situation of red fire ants did not understand the existence of these ant lions.
These ant lions are only known to the warriors of the red fire ant kingdom and the digging ants who are responsible for collecting the eggs and taking care of them, but the ant slaves do not know about them. They only know that these pits cannot be entered.
The protagonist looked at these pits and suddenly had an idea.
The original plan was to go to [Hive City] for an armed march to put pressure on the fire ant country. Now if these ant lions, which are regarded as barriers by the fire ants, are eliminated, it will definitely shock them!
Just do it, the protagonist doesn't know how to kill the ant lion hidden deep underground, but he can give it a try.
At the beginning, a small group of warriors from the Envoy King rushed down into the pit together, trying to use their numerical advantage to besiege the ant lions.
But the ant lions are hidden underground, and the ants have to move away the gravel to find them. Once these ant lions find themselves exposed, they will continue to drill down, and the warriors of the God's Envoy King cannot touch the ant lions at all.
Instead, the ant lion thrust out its jaws like lightning from time to time and struck out, dragging down one Divine Envoy King warrior after another to kill them.
When the team lost more than a dozen warriors and still failed to find the true form of the ant lion, the protagonist ordered other troops to extend long hay stems into the pit road and pull out the remaining warriors.
Later, the protagonist ordered the soldiers to throw sand in, trying to fill the pit and force the ant lion to climb up on its own.
After the ant lion noticed that the sand pit was slowly being covered, he finally leaned out half of his body and continued to throw sand to the ground with his big jaws. It is very fast, and this behavior of throwing soil is its instinct. The ants gathered together, and the speed of filling the hole was barely equal to the speed of throwing soil, and they could not fill the sand pit at all.
Later, the protagonist came up with another plan, but this time he needed to wait for some supplies.
So he ordered the flying knights to return to [Hive City] and prepare some supplies to bring, while the other warriors of the Angel King postponed the attack and began to build a temporary camp outside the ant lion trap, while searching for dry grass and dead branches.
The red fire ant army huddled in the [Beehive City] without any movement. It seemed that they were preparing to defend the main nest and had no intention of driving away the nearby Angel King's army.
