You know, when I got this new journal, I actually had a plan in place for how I wanted to get all my thoughts down. I knew what order I wanted to put my notes in place, what creatures I wanted to talk about before and after each one, all of that. But earlier this week, I got called up for a job I've always hated having to do and just got done spending three whole days getting it done: Clearing a Spider-Ant outpost.
So, you know what? The old order can get janked, I'm talking about those things here and now.
Where to even begin with these damn things? Maybe the part where they're smart enough to strategize and plan complex maneuvers and tactics in wars against us? Or the part where they are physically incapable of empathy and are unable to be reasoned with? Or maybe the part where not only have these things gotten tougher like everything else over the years, but their numbers have ballooned exponentially too, like they're double-compensating for our newer, more advanced weapon systems?
What can I say about these things that you can't find in stuff like the Encyclopedia? I can give you an on the ground view of what it's like. I can't speak of what it was like in the 1400's or so years ago. If we go by the records, Spider Ant assaults back then were hundreds of thousands, sometimes single millions strong, when the most common infantry weapon were lever and bolt actions. Now? Imagine, if you will, a carpet, a living sea of bodies, millions at the low end, coming at you with their expendable fodder up front, their elites held in reserve or to siege weak points, while digging creatures try to go under, living artillery pieces having duels with our own artillery pieces, all the while they are supported by an inverse rain of their Hellhawk Hornet relatives swarming in clouds so thick, day becomes night.
This is what an average Spider Ant assault looks like these days, billions of creatures besieging our cities with one, and only one, purpose: To kill us all. Why? Why do this? Why waste billions of their own lives for a fight they are almost certain to lose, with a counter-attack that lasts months to annihilate their hives down to the last, never once the thought of diplomacy, or negotiation, or even trying to cow us into submission? Why waste time building up forces for another similar assault every 30 or so odd years like some demented clock work?
Because they can't. They don't see us as people. Some hear 'they don't have empathy' and think it's just fluff, but no. All other creatures I've fought on this world, even theoretically, are capable of empathy. Because even a Jaco Killer or a Bloodsucker has mirror neurons, they can come to see us as people if the stars align and the universe blinks in a moment of lucidity on this hellscape.
But I mean this genuinely, Spider-Ants physically
cant be reasoned with. The 'they lack mirror neurons' isn't some propagandized spin to justify everything, I've seen it. I've felt it. I may not be the most advanced Magi, but I can still sense emotion. I may not be a biologist, but I still know enough to know what to look for. I've sensed these things while they're alive. I've touched their minds. I've cracked open their skulls and sifted through their brains to find something, anything, and you know what I found?
There's
nothing there. These things are more machine than actual literal ants are, there is a physical lack of the capacity to feel anything about other life forms than themselves beyond 'useful' and 'not-useful', a binary of 'kill' or 'don't kill'. And they decided we have to go. Why? Who even knows anymore, it's been going on so long that for all we know, the first fight between us Civilized Species and the Spider Ants was an accident in ancient cave people times, but regardless of the 'why', something happened that had us labeled as a rival to be destroyed, and now there's no going back.
It boggles my mind how a life form like this can even exist. Ants are the most ruthless species I'm aware of in the natural world, and even they can have moments of understanding with other life forms to coexist peacefully. 'Don't mess with us, we won't mess with you'. But these things just.....I called them machine-like, and there's always theories in the scientific community. We know for a fact these things are not true natives to Null, but placed here, possibly by Uplifters, to fill an ecological niche in the system of this world.
But if that's the case, if these are truly alien beings, who have been here so long and yet have not adapted to such fundamental processes as Nullian life form ways of thinking, it begs the question: How is this possible? Why is this possible? Everyone knows the story of the Ogra, I had an Ogra teacher in my high school biology class explain his own species evolutionary history during a fundamentals class. They were literally built for war, blood lust encoded in their genome, and yet even they have adapted and outgrown their old programming. So what is the difference here?
Current theory is that the Spider Ants are not a naturally occurring species, but rather some higher civilization's biological weapon experiment, one that got samples stolen and tossed into our neck of the woods. Which, if true, would explain a whole lot about them. I've been fighting these things all of my life. I survived my first Spider Ant war when I was still just a teenager, killed my first one, a Scrapper, with my first combat knife as it was trying to melt down the door for raw materials. Every combat related job I've had, be it Hunter, Knight, or freelancer has seen me fight these things. I've killed every basic unit, from dog sized Workers and Scrappers, to Warriors who don't have to raise themselves up to look me dead in the eye, as well as all the fancier stuff like the various Scorpion classes or the incendiary Burn Bugs, the living battering rams that are Crushers, or their psionic Neuroculus sub commanders.
If there's one thing I've gotten good at fighting, it's them. So, in the event someone else in my family gets my notes one day, I might as well give in some tips and tricks I learned.
1. Scrappers and Workers are always the most common units in any Spider Ant engagement. Even when you stumble upon an outpost they set up, there's always these two identical creatures scurrying around, bringing in resources or using those resources to build whatever structures they need. They are cannon fodder, the single most expendable life form in their roster despite their importance in creating their tunnels and networks and gathering resources. Kill one, ten, a hundred even, they'll always have more to replace them without issue. It is for this reason, however, that they are inversely some of the most dangerous as a whole. While any other individual life form they can produce is pound-for-pound more dangerous and a bigger individual threat, the sheer weight of numbers and their infrastructure damaging capabilities of Scrappers in particular means ignoring them is not an option. As such, if you are fighting Spider Ants alone or in a small group, your threat assessment must be in constant flux, deciding between the fodder and the larger, more dangerous creatures constantly
2. The 'War' Class such as Warriors, Scorpions and more each have their own distinct roles that make them each a unique threat in combat. Warriors are physically imposing and dangerous in melee with a medium range bioplasma attack, with their Spiker variants having longer range, and accurate, toxin covered spikes that can pierce armor weak-points. Scorpions come in newer, sleeker, front-line variants with a bioplasma thrower on their tail, while the older, larger versions act as living artillery, both excellent anti-armor units in combat for different ranges. The Burn Bug generates burning acid sprays and clouds, the Spine Slasher is a living one creature ambush that hides under the ground before springing out its blade tipped tendrils, the Psych-Out has rudimentary psionic abilities to disorient and confuse enemy combatants, ect ect. The one unifying feature of them all is a thick armored carapace, barring weak points, that can eat direct hits from normal Slugger rounds. They'll even ping off glancing blows from rail weapon shots, so picking your ammo or your shots is crucial to fighting them.
3. The 'Beast' Class is all of the big, heavy stuff. Crushers are living battering rams, while Earth Movers are massive, semi-worm like tunnelers that make breaches for large scale invasion forces to enter through, and the Tankers are a very rough analog to, well, a battle tank, complete with a symbiotic organism on its back that acts like a highly pressurized water cutter cannon, but with acid. And those are just the basic stuff. They are the things you bring anti tank munitions out for, or just say 'fuck it' and haul out the tanks to fight them. One on one, any Median tank can trounce these things no problem. But it's never one on one with the Ants, and economically it's better to save those for major engagements while just handing anti tank cannons and rockers to kill teams to hunt these things down. Someone had the bright idea to try and feed a Tanker a grenade belt, but all it did was piss it off. I got desperate and tried the same trick but with anti-armor grenades meant for Warriors, and that stunned one long enough for a heavy weapons team to finish it off. Tough bastards, the lot of them. Wait for back up if you don't have AT weapons, or just focus on escaping and surviving if you don't have support coming.
4. The 'Leader' Class is everything that, well, leads. Soldiers are advanced forms of Warriors with advanced pheromone and psionic abilities that allow them to coordinate on the front lines like an officer class, while doubling as elite infantry units. The Neuroculus are mostly held in reserve unless we set up radio jammers. Spider Ants use high band radio frequencies to communicate with one another over long distances, and jamming that causes them to berserk and loose cohension until a Psi commander takes over. This actually makes them more dangerous, coordination wise, but the amount of resources for a dedicated psi-commander means they're held in reserve until absolutely necessary. The Mind Eater class is one psi-class that is purpose built for combat, however: Heavily armored and with the most powerful psionics outside a King or Queen, they psychically tear apart their enemies both with mental assaults and with more tangible esoteric powers. Kings are the 'generals' of an war, and finding and taking it out is crucial to disorienting the swarm's more complex maneuvers and coordination. Finding and killing a Queen, meanwhile, is the death knell of a Hive, though there's smart enough to keep back up 'princesses' in reserve, so finding and killing those is important to stop a hive from resurging.
5. There's many different Hives, each with their own distinct identifying markers. The ones pictured above is the Hive nearest to Dreamhold in the wider region, the 'Crescent Head' Hive, so named after their, well, you can see. They're not all that special in terms of specialization or tactics, and they lack more unique units some Hives have developed in other regions, but they're absolute pains in the neck to deal with due to their incredible reproductive rates even by Spider Ant standards. We've depopulated the region of them more times than I can keep count over the centuries, but they always come back, always having some hidden underground nursery they hid away just for the occasion and always ballooning back to invasion sizes in a few decades time.
6. Spider Ant invasions always leads to a
lot of dead Ants. And this is both a good and bad thing. Good news, their bodies make excellent fertilizer both for food production and for the wilds. Bad news, it means a boom in plant growth which needs to be tended to lest that causes its own set of problems. So post-Spider Ant War clean up is always a whole thing.
7. This is a big one: Never underestimate the Ants intelligence. They're as close to machine like as a living thing can get, which makes them predictable in a lot of ways, but also deprives them of one of intelligence's biggest stumbling points: They're ironically too stupid to make mistakes. Very clinical, machine precision, they don't do fuck ups the same way sapient creatures do, so as predictable as they are, do
not think you can trick them the same way you could trick most other life forms.
I've got plenty of other tips and tricks, but this entry is getting pretty big at this point and I've got plenty of other things I want to stuff this journal with. Lots of knowledge to get down.
I will say this much, however: While is likely the only way the Spider Ant wars will stop is with one side fully dead, we here at the Median are always looking for work arounds and solutions to problems that seem unsolvable. I've got this job, guard work in the labs here at Dreamhold, and while I can't say much even here in this journal, at least not until I can make sure I can keep it nice and hidden away, I can say this much: There's all kinds of experiments they're trying to force a peaceful solution to this blunt force equation.
One team is trying to see that if Spider-Ants don't have mirror neurons naturally, if they can't add some in. Another is working for a special project called 'Beastlord'. Saying any more than the name is unwise, but what they're cooking up is extra special. Will take time for anything to come out of that, though. Don't even know if it'll work, but hey, you can always hope, you know?
