147 The Fall Of ConstANTinople

Tearing off and tossing away his arm hurt Ackster both physically and emotionally since he was certain his regeneration skills weren't powerful enough to regenerate it. But it wasn't all bad. It served as excellent bait to distract the worker ants hounding him like rabid flies. The queen had also partly lost focus, and it seemed like she was conflicted about the arm and Ackster elbow her.

The relative benefits didn't stop there. Along with the arm, Ackster had also lost a bunch of weight and surface area. He weighed less and could thus move around more easily. It would also be more difficult for the ant queen to land a blow on his right side now that his arm was no longer there to catch it.

Ackster used forceful reasoning like that as he crouched down slightly with his remaining fist pressed to his body, coiled like a spring. His loose arm had bought him some time, but Ackster was still running out of it. And he had to end this battle as quickly as possible.

So, he gathered all his strength in his legs.

All of his skills harmonized with his body to deliver the maximum power possible. Then, Limit Breaker joined the party and brought the power levels beyond what Ackster's body was physically capable of.

After gathering all his strength, Ackster knew that delaying would only tire and weaken him, so he shot off the ground and up toward the ant queen's underbelly like launched from a trebuchet.

While the ant queen was tall, her underbelly wasn't that much further above the ground than Ackster's head, which was why he could punch her so easily. And now that he jumped, he reached her exoskeleton with ease.

But Ackster didn't only reach it.

After all the damage he had inflicted during his dance with the queen and her workers, a sudden, full-power strike was enough to break through it.

Ackster's fist smashed through the hard carapace and reached the soft insides of the ant queen's thorax, where her heart was.

The ant queen was large, so even after piercing his arm into her thorax, Ackster didn't immediately find the heart. But as long as there was an opening and he could reach inside, he could unleash as much damage as necessary. So, before he slipped out again, he clawed and tore with his fingers like a dog faced with an especially rude backyard.

And when he felt himself falling back down, he grabbed whatever he could and pulled it back out with him.

The hole was just small enough for him to lodge his arm in and use his muscles to wedge himself stuck. But the cracks spread and widened the hole, so he fell down to the ground, clutching a lump of soft tissue.

Ackster hastily threw it in his mouth before bouncing back up like a rubber ball and repeating the process multiple times.

He paid no attention to the ant queen's screams, the returning worker ants, or the blood gushing down his stump. All of those things were irrelevant distractions. If Ackster didn't focus wholeheartedly on tearing apart the queen's insides, he would die. So, that's what he did. He shut out the rest of the world and did the bare minimum, such as kick and stomp on the ants that got in his way, as he mangled the queen's thorax until he couldn't reach any more soft tissue.

He had scraped the area around the hole he made clean. But that wasn't all he had done.

With the ant queen's fervent movements and the loss of balance that came with the loss of an arm, Ackster had missed the hole on more than one occasion and, in the process, made new ones or expanded it.

The ant queen's thorax had lost enough of its structural integrity. A couple of more punches was all it took for Ackster to make it collapse.

The ant queen buckled like a bridge with its middle support pillars removed and folded down on Ackster, who remained where he was. He could move out of the way. But he didn't. He couldn't let go of this prime opportunity to access all of the ant queen's insides.

He faced the incoming ant queen's body with a raised arm and slightly bent knees to brace himself as he used his body to break into the ant queen's thorax, or what remained of it.

With the ant queen's body covering him, the faint light from the stones in the ceiling had no hope of reaching Ackster. It was absolutely pitch-black, and Ackster didn't even know if his eyes were open or closed. He hoped they were closed, however, since he didn't want them to fill up with the blood and juices of the queen's insides.

And so, with eyes closed, body riddled with cuts, scrapes, and injuries, and with a missing arm, Ackster went to town on the ant queen from within her. He punched, kicked, scratched, and bit everything that came in his path, aiming to deal as much destruction as possible now that he had finally gotten an opportunity to vent the anger he felt at the ant queen taking his arm.

And with the ant queen's body encapsulating him, he was safe both from the queen herself and the other ants.

He lost himself in a dazed rampage and only came to once he realized that the only reason the ant queen's body was moving was due to him. Ackster felt around, and he could tell that he had practically emptied out the ant queen's midsection by instinctively eating everything soft enough to go down his gullet.

He briefly got worried that his instincts had grown to incorporate something so barbaric. But he had to admit that it was a good thing. It was also something he had started working toward, making his body act on its own without his constant supervision.

Ackster took a deep breath and heaved an even deeper sigh before he, still panting, decided to try and find his way out of the ant queen. He fumbled around until he found something solid that sloped downward that he could break through to get out of the queen's body. However, unlike the wall-like side he had expected, there was an opening filled with gore and internal organs.

It was just wide enough for him to crawl through if he so wished.