The sky over the abandoned industrial district was the color of old concrete. Meruem stood on the rooftop, both hands raised slightly in front of him, and studied his own aura the way a scientist examines a specimen that has just exceeded the projected results.
He had been doing this for four minutes.
Then he released it downward.
His feet left the roof. The pressure against the soles of his feet climbed as he added more, and he rose through the first hundred meters with the unhurried pace of something that had decided the ceiling was an inconvenience rather than a limit. A hundred meters was impressive by any human standard. A strong Emission-type Nen user, pouring maximum output downward in concentrated bursts, might manage it for thirty seconds before their aura ran dry. The effort would leave them hollow.
Meruem reached a hundred meters and had not come close to noticing.
Two hundred meters. The arc of the coastline resolved below him, the strait beyond it, and past the strait, at the edge of visible range, the arrangement of lights and geometries that constituted the human world. The scale of it was larger than he had understood from ground level.
He continued upward. Three hundred meters.
The sensation that his aura could travel indefinitely, extend wherever he directed it, go anywhere he chose, was less a revelation than a confirmation of something he had suspected from the moment Chelich explained Emission to him. Distance, it turned out, was a concern for other Nen types.
He reached out and let his aura shape itself into something functional. The construct took form in front of him: flat, dense, approximately the dimensions of a narrow boat. He had not planned the shape in advance. It felt natural in the way that most things felt natural to him, which was to say instantly and completely. He wrapped his tail against his body to clear the surface, extended one hand to his knee, and sat.
The light-construct carried him toward the strait. It accelerated from standing to fast enough that it left an afterimage, then kept accelerating. From the rooftop below, it would have looked like a star moving in the wrong direction.
"Hey! Meruem! Where are you going?!"
Chelich stood on the edge of the rooftop and watched the light-construct shrink toward the horizon until it was indistinguishable from a weather reflection on the water. Then it was not there.
She lowered her arm.
There had not been any warning. No declared agenda. No elaborated reasoning. The Ant King had been standing on the rooftop with his hands out, doing what looked like a training exercise, and then he had constructed a vehicle out of concentrated aura and left in a direction that was, as best she could determine, away.
"He probably has something to do," said a voice beside her.
Menthuthuyoupi had materialized at her left shoulder with the quiet presence of a large dog who has wandered over because something interesting is happening. His eyes tracked the direction of the departed light-construct with the focused attention of someone who has absolutely no idea what is happening but feels that attention is the appropriate response.
"He sits in front of a laptop all day," Chelich said. "What exactly does he have to do?"
A thought occurred to her: the keyboard warriors. There were people on the internet who had apparently found footage of chimera ant attacks and were making comments. Meruem, who had approached the concept of human opinion with the contempt of a man sorting mail from organizations he had never heard of, had been reading the comments. She had observed him reading them. She had made a mental note to watch for signs of escalation.
This could be escalation.
Beside her, Menthuthuyoupi jumped.
The jump covered something in the region of several kilometers. He landed somewhere at the base of the district and began running, his silhouette diminishing in the direction Meruem had gone with the single-minded dedication of someone who had processed exactly one piece of information: the Ant King had moved, therefore he should also move.
Chelich watched him go.
The three Royal Guards had instinct so deeply embedded it preceded thought. Meruem could leave without explanation or warning and Menthuthuyoupi would follow him without question or expectation of catching up, simply because the alternative, from Menthuthuyoupi's operational standpoint, did not appear to be available.
She had briefly considered explaining to him that instinct was a leash. She had decided this was a lesson she did not want to teach him right now.
She went downstairs.
Meruem's room was exactly as he had left it, which meant the laptop was still open on the table, still powered on, and still displaying something that was not a standard web browser.
Chelich pulled out the chair, sat down, and pressed the space bar. The screen brightened.
The interface was stripped-down. No background image. No visible file system. Just a dialogue box, the kind of minimal window that appeared in programmer environments and in older chat protocols. The kind that most people had not seen in years because user interfaces had evolved toward things that looked friendly. This one made no effort to look friendly. It looked functional.
She read the username on the outgoing messages. It said User.
The other side said Pe.
She read from the beginning.
Pe: Do you think your purpose, as the Ant King, is to conquer the world?
User: Isn't it? Why else would I be born with this much power?
Pe: You keep phrasing things as questions. That tells me you've been thinking about this for a while and haven't settled on an answer. If you were certain, you'd have stated it as fact.
Pe: Set aside the conquest idea for a moment. No matter how powerful you become — even if you were ten times more powerful than you are now — you could not conquer the human world. This isn't an insult. It isn't a judgment on chimera ants or on you specifically. It's just the current state of human military technology. Individual power, even extraordinary individual power, has been functionally irrelevant to large-scale conflict since approximately the mid-twentieth century. You are thinking about a type of war that doesn't exist anymore.
Pe: Also: the scattered ant colonies that have been attacking populated areas have already put you on a timeline. The V5 nations are mobilizing. This is not a distant problem.
User: There's no such thing as a stupid move in Gungi. The ant colonies exist for me. My name is Meruem.
Pe: You have a name. Personal identity is well-developed. That makes the life-purpose question more pressing, not less.
User: No... I didn't choose the name myself.
Chelich paused here.
The timestamp on Meruem's reply showed it had taken him much longer to type that single line than the content warranted. She had some experience in reading the subtext of delayed responses. She suspected the original reply had been longer, possibly a full explanation of the name's origin, and that it had been deleted before sending. Meruem, who processed information faster than any creature she had encountered in either of her lifetimes, had sat in front of this conversation for a discernible amount of time and then chosen to say less.
This was either development or vulnerability. She was reserving judgment.
Pe: From the queen? The chimera ant queen actually named you. That's more personal awareness than I expected from a queen ant.
After this line, Meruem had posted a block of text. It was not his own words. He had pulled it from an online encyclopedia and copied it in. The article covered chimera ant biology and colonial structure.
The summary, condensed: chimera ant workers, officers, and guards existed in permanent service to the queen. The queen's biological purpose was reproduction. The purpose of reproduction was to eventually produce the Ant King. Once the Ant King was born, his instinctive drive was to find a mate from outside the colony and produce a new queen. The new queen would then repeat the cycle. The Ant King was, in the article's neutral scientific language, a vehicle for the production of the next queen.
User: Is the purpose of existence to conquer the world? Or is the whole thing just... reproduction? More cycles?
Pe: The Ant King is probably just a tool for producing the next queen. The world-conquest drive is most likely a mechanism that keeps the Ant King in a fighting state and away from competitors until the biological function is complete. What do you think?
Chelich skipped past Pe's next block of text and then went back and read it properly, because she had caught the tone in the first pass and her first instinct had been to dismiss it, which she had learned to treat as a signal worth examining.
Pe's argument, delivered at considerable length and with the cadence of someone who had explained it many times and had not yet encountered a satisfactory counterargument, was structured as follows: human beings, like chimera ants, existed primarily to reproduce and transmit genetic material. This had been true for millions of years. The interesting part, Pe argued, was that the process had eventually generated a result that undermined its own premise. Humans had produced the capacity to opt out: no reproduction, no death, no birth, no the specific biological machinery that had built them. Consciousness uploaded to a network, distributed across electromagnetic fields, effectively permanent. The chains of the neurotransmitter, Pe said, could finally be cut.
In a sense, Chelich thought, Pe was preaching. The exact earnestness of someone who has found a solution to suffering and cannot understand why everyone is still suffering.
She had encountered this type before, in a previous life, in contexts ranging from investment pitches to religious organizations. The argument was not wrong in its component parts. It was merely that the conclusion it reached, which involved dissolving into a wireless network and becoming light, was the sort of conclusion that sounded different depending on what you were in the process of losing.
After Pe's philosophical sermon, there was a gap in the chat log. A long gap.
Then the connection status on Pe's side went offline. Meruem had not responded. Pe had not sent anything further.
Chelich sat with this for a moment.
The issue was not that the argument was unsound. The argument was, in fact, more structurally coherent than most of what passed for philosophy in the circles she had previously occupied. The issue was that it was the kind of argument that found the cracks in your defenses and settled there, and she was currently in a situation that had more cracks than usual. Previous identity: destroyed. Current body: wrong species, wrong sex, wrong scale. Political network: scattered. The power base she was constructing here was real, but it was also, she was clear-eyed enough to acknowledge, provisional in a way that her previous power base had never been.
If she could not recover what she had lost, Pe's argument would become considerably more relevant.
She closed the laptop. The sound it made was louder than she intended.
Outside, the overcast sky had finally made a decision. Rain began to fall across the abandoned district, tapping steadily against the roof and the broken windows and the silent machinery below, producing the particular white noise of a world that was continuing without asking anyone's permission.
Chelich did not move from the chair for a while.