Ant Massacre

After smashing the first ant, the ones nearby started swarming me, I could deal with them fairly easily by just bashing their heads in or cutting them up with my spikes.

They were coming from everywhere, and every direction I would turn to would be jam-packed with tens of them, at first, just killing the closest one's without much thought worked but as more started trying to reach me I found myself being trapped.

After dealing with about a hundred of them, some buffed ants with armor and sharp jaws started coming out of the hole, they couldn't immediately reach me because of the group surrounding me but they just started climbing over them.

I didn't even notice them until they almost reached me, as the first one reached me the normal ants became more aggressive, some got through my defense and ripped small parts of my flesh.

"Aargh! Fucking...!" I jumped over the ants towards a tree then I started climbing it but they were quick to adapt as some of them started mauling on the tree with their big jaws.

"Fucking... I'll kill you all!" As the tree fell I found myself trapped by the hundreds of ants out to get me.

I fought, and for each one I killed, ten took its place, after a short while, the armored ones also reached me.

One of them lunged at me, I jumped and landed on its back, then struck down with my spikes... but it did nothing, my spike just bounced off.

'Wait! This is the deepest part of the woods! Why was I so confident I could take on this many monsters!?' I looked up, hoping that Yukina will lend me a hand but she was nowhere to be seen. 'Did she really leave me here? Now I'm really fucked.'

In my moment of distraction, another one jumped at me but I couldn't dodge in time, I was struck in my hip. The hit took away part of my armor and my flesh, the wound was so deep it reached the bone.

I hit it back, now with the horn material, but it again bounced off. The damn thing didn't even flinch, but instead struck back, and a standoff ensued.

For every attempt at a hit I gave it, the ant would take off another chunk of my flesh, and soon enough, my body started to succumb, I tried to escape but the other ants would stop me, then the same armored ant would attack me again, it was like a game for them, they stand around their hero as it fights a tiger, but I'm more of a house cat compared to it.

My legs gave out, then not long after my arms became useless, I could only kneel in front of it, waiting for the final blow, but the ant didn't want its moment of glory to end so soon as it raised its head in celebration, then I saw it.

A soft spot in its armor, I could tell because it would mold to its body when it moved its head.

'If I'm dying, I'll take you with me!' Using all the willpower I had left, I focused my regeneration on my arm, in an instant it reached a point where I can finally move it, then I launched a punch at the beast, it started off slow but in its path, my bare fist was being covered by a gauntlet made of bone with the knuckles being made out of the horn and their tips made out of ice.

The punch landed right on the center of the soft spot and as it went inside, the spikes rapidly lengthened and branched into all directions, destroying the ant's insides.

After that, I began to lose consciousness, my fist was stuck in the ant as it screeched before collapsing. The other ants were baffled and just awkwardly stood around waiting for another to do something first.

{Self Preservation Mode Activated}

The armor of the ant melted and began covering me, it bound my arms and legs to my body and began forming an egg around me.

....

-Inside The God's Palace-

I awoke on a stone platform, my body was intact, but I was naked, the chitin armor was gone and so were the bone plates, even the horn and ice materials were missing.

"Hello, young man..." A voice greeted me, it was strong and commanding.

I looked up at it and saw a man sitting on a throne far in the distance. There were thousands of other figures sitting all around me on different levels, like in a circus where the audience stood around the performers, but here the atmosphere was much more serious.

"Where am I?

"You have been brought here to decide on your... benefactors."

"..."

"We are the gods of the world. People are not usually brought here, but because of the exceptional number of gods interested in you, we have made an exception."

"You... are going to give me my powers?"

"Not me personally, I have no interest in you, the strongest interested god would usually be the one to give the power but it wouldn't have been a good thing to have four hundred gods fight, especially now..."

"Four hundred gods are interested in me!?"

"That's right, I must agree with them that you have been fun to watch since you reincarnated, so you better make a good decision so you can entertain us in the future too! Haha!"

"Entertain... Alright, I can do that as long as you can get me out of that situation."

"Haha! Alright, should I start listing the offers from the gods?"

"First, do they come at a price?"

"I guess you don't know a lot about this world yet, I will explain. You have a system right?"

"Yes."

"That was given to you by a god or gods of your previous world, for you, it's just a helpful thing, or perhaps a little friend, but for those gods it's a way of learning about this world, to gather information on us for the eventual war of the worlds, so they will demand your soul back once you die.

You were supposed to be killed by that ant today, but by some twisted fate or pure luck, which I checked weren't given by the respective gods, you have survived.

So I am forced to strip the system from your soul before you leave this place."

"You're going to take my system away? But I need it, it's incredibly helpful, is there no way to keep it without relaying information?"

"I can't do that, since it's made to self-destruct if found out. Oh, the foolish gods of earth, they are so old and incompetent, it's so easy to bypass that old war method by just duplicating the soul altogether."

"But what will happen to my old soul, will you destroy it?"

"Well, yes, but you wouldn't be in it while that happens as I will be transferring your memories to the new one."

"Oh... it's still feels uncomfortable but I guess it's the only way."

He just nodded, a little apologetical.

"Going back to the powers, they don't have any cost of receiving them except for some of the offers, but they all cost your "mana" to cast, that mana is just another form of energy gathered by humans and some other creatures and monsters' bodies, that is why some of the monsters you fought didn't have any powers."

"I see."

"Now, shall we get to the point of the meeting?"

"Please."

"I will start listing the offers of the gods, please keep the ones you fancy in mind."

"Okay."

"I will begin with the weakest god but that doesn't specifically mean that their offer is worse than any other god. First, the god of food offers you the power to..."

He started listing the offers of every single god, he kept going on and on through the four hundred offers, I kept note of the ones that interested me the most.

While I must say that particularly the offer from the goddess of lust was the most enticing, the ones that caught my attention the most were the goddess of the moon, the god of fire, the god of monsters, the god of space, and the god of time.

To my surprise, the gods of space and time weren't even in the top twenty gods, and these were only the gods that gave me offers, most of the last gods I could comprehend but their powers didn't arise much interest from me, except for the last three.

The god of chaos, the god of death, and the goddess of life. All three of them offered the same thing, raw power, the goddess would give it to me in exchange for being good, the god of death for being evil, and the god of chaos for never picking sides.

They were all coming with a cost, and they would all give me great drawbacks in exchange for their power, but I had already made my choice.

"I choose the Goddess of Spirits as my benefactor!"