A sea of lush, green grass stretched far into the distance. Vibrant trees dotted the area sporadically, along with a few rugged bushes. A few blades of grass split apart to reveal about two dozen ants and one human boy claiming to be one.
Nis was mixed in with the group of marching ants. It was almost like he was a real soldier. Well, technically, he was now. He had officially joined the Commander's personal unit, which was quite the honour actually.
This was the reward for Nis's great and honorable deed. Oddly, he found being a rank-and-file soldier was pretty chill. He didn't have much work, just fight things when told and a couple of menial tasks like gathering and packing supplies. And Nis didn't have to fight just yet.
Nis watched the Commander's back as he led the way. He was a little worried, as this was the first mission he had been deployed on, so he just kept looking forward toward the destination. Many of the other ants around him were too tense to take their eyes off the surroundings, a couple were actually pretty relaxed, simply gossiping about what they thought would be found at our destination.
The destination they were speaking about was a food collection point. The ants had designated certain spots where there were ample resources and sent out teams to collect from them. For one reason or another, the team sent out hadn't returned. Nis would have loved to speculate about what abomination had found the collection team, but alas, he didn't know enough to even make a basic guess. Fortunately, Nis had something far weirder to think about.
That was the fact that this planet made no sense. It had been about a week since Nis had first arrived. Three of those days, he supposedly spent passed out. Except that was only true for this planet. It turned out that a 'day' on this planet wasn't twenty-four hours like on Earth, but something closer to twelve hours. At least that was what it felt like to Nis. It was six hours of daylight and six hours of moonlight. So the time he spent passed out would probably be closer to one and a half Earth days.
It was pretty hard for Nis to wrap his head around a day not being a 'day'. Thankfully, there were even more things that made even less sense. Like this planet's ecosystem in general. Nis found that the name of the planet was Kragkoa, and the people were called Kragkoans. It was pretty hard to get someone to tell him that, since it should have been common knowledge.
Kragkoa was truly a specimen of a planet. Firstly, it was stupidly small. Well, at least compared to Earth. If you wish to walk a full circle around the planet, it would only take about 8 Earth months by Nis's estimation. Since it was so small, at first Nis thought that the gravity should have been very low, like the moon, except it wasn't. For some godforsaken reason, the gravity felt about the same as Earth's. Just the thought of how that could possibly work made Nis sick to his stomach. It was an affront to physics.
To take his mind off that, there were more sciences to violate. For biology, there was the planet's flora and fauna. First of all, all the plants were jumbo-sized, which of course, included the fruits that they bore. A single fruit could feed a single ant for many Earth weeks if preserved. Sadly, the bugs didn't have a means of preservation currently, so they just portioned them out and brought new ones when necessary.
How were plants so big, sustainable on a planet so small? Why were the plants that big in the first place? It's like they were scaled up to align with the fact that the ants were the size of humans, but what would be the purpose of that? What was even worse than the fact that they were so big, was the fact that they were alive at all.
For plants to bloom, proliferate, and grow, a few things were necessary. In this case, they had most of them except one. That one thing was that this planet was seriously lacking pollinators. In fact, it lacked species as a whole. There was a singular form of life natural to the planet, the Kragkoans. There were no other races. The bugs had the whole planet to themselves.
This was the fact that hurt Nis's brain the most. He hadn't even considered it before. When he first heard the supply line was cut, he was left bewildered that no one even thought to mention hunting. He wasn't sure the ants were fans of meat, but dire times called for dire measures. But to his surprise, there was simply nothing to hunt; hunting as a concept couldn't exist without the goal of hunting.
It was wild to think that a single race could even survive on a planet alone. Nis was sure it had broken the rules of biology somehow, but didn't know what exactly. He did know that it broke the rules for the plants, though. Ants were pollinators but not primary pollinators. They wouldn't carry nearly enough pollen to the flowers to facilitate how lush the plant life here was. This was a massive problem on Earth, too; the lack of pollinators still alive was one of the many reasons so much of the Earth was desert.
By all means, this planet should be nothing more than a desolate rock in space, yet here it was, arguably doing better than Nis's home planet. It really gave him a headache to think about. And he couldn't even yell about how little sense it made, since this was just how life was for the ants.
Nis wiped some of the sweat from his forehead. The headache this information gave him was so bad that one of his eyes was twitching.
'You know what? Forget it! Who cares that nothing makes sense? Why should I care? Not like this is my world. I don't live here. As long as this godforsaken dirtball doesn't blow up while I'm on it, it's fine. Let's think about fun things, like the Infected.'
Over the course of the short week, Nis found out a few more things about Reality Warpers. Well, of course, he had; almost everyone in the Defence Force was a Reality Warper. And as a new Reality Warper himself, this was easier to ask questions about. The main thing Nis asked about was actually Ranks.
Out of everything Nis had found out about from the voice, the thing he understood the least was ranks. All that Nis knew was that 'It defines you as a being' and that he was an 'Individual'.
The first thing that Nis found out was that ranking up was not detrimental, like he had joked about before, but was actually the greatest benefit he could get. When he ranked up, there would be a qualitative difference in strength. Nis thought that leveling up was his way to increase his strength, but it was actually both. Leveling up was like the difference of going from lifting twenty-five-pound weights to one-hundred-pound weights, which was definitely a good improvement, but ranking up was on a whole other level. Rather than lifting heavier weights, the jump was much greater. Like being able to lift a car, something that no matter how many levels you rose, you would not be able to attain.
Not only that, a Warper would also obtain a new ability each time they reached a new rank. Hearing that made Nis really look forward to a rank up, since his current ability basically did nothing, maybe the next one would actually do something. And Nis found out exactly how Warper raises their ranks.
Simply put, it was through Incursions. Nis already knew that Incursions were important for Reality Warpers, but he had never known how. On completion of an Incursion, the reward given was a rank up. So, whether Nis wanted to or not, as long as he survived this incursion, he would no longer be an Individual.
With this info, Nis also found out a couple of the future ranks. And... well, they were just as confusing as the first one.
The first rank was Individual. It is what every normal person is and what every new Warper starts as. It was something like the normal state of existence for all lifeforms.
The next rank was called Multiple.
'I mean, I guess it makes sense. What's greater than something singular? It could only be a multiple of something. But did it really make sense?'
Most of the Warpers in the Defence Force were Multiples, people who had been on a singular Incursion. Yet, they were all one person. Why were they called Multiples if they were still one person? You would think they would be a hive mind group of people at least.
No one Nis spoke to could come up with a good answer for why it was named that way. It was just the way it was, and had always been. Why would anyone question it?
Next were people who had been on two Incursions. Only two people in the entirety of Kragkoa had reached this rank. Of course, these two were the Commander and Vice-Commander, Krakobain and Kreeyabi. And their rank was called... Land.
'What kinda nonsense is that?'
For some reason, the third rank didn't follow the same naming convention. At least not obviously. The first two alluded to numbers and made Nis think of a number a people, as in an individual person and multiple people.
'But what in the hell is a land? Do I become the floor? Do I have to let people walk on me? Is the floor a greater existence than I am... well, I guess that last one makes sense. I mean the floor is the planet and I can't outright say I'm better than a whole planet... I'm only better than the people on the planet, so the floor can have its victory... What was I on about?'
It felt like the answers Nis got just confused him more. The headache Nis tried to forget returned all too quickly.
He scratched his head and focused his eyes back on the Commander again.
'A Land, huh?'
At that moment, the Commander's voice rang out.
"We are approaching the collection spot! Be alert and follow me, Brothers!"
Just hearing the Commander's voice cleared the pain from Nis's mind and put him in a state of focus.
A small smile bloomed on Nis's face, and a quiet whisper escaped his lips.
"Alright, surely, nothing will go wrong... Haha, like hell it won't."