Nothing Venture, Nothing Win.

The sunlight slanting down from the towering ceiling faded silently into nothingness. Simultaneously, the surroundings filled with shadows, and the contours of every object began to blur into the dimness.

Turning around quietly, I gazed at the faces of the people and monsters waiting for their cue behind me. Even in this deep gloom, each and every face stood out with absolute clarity. They were an incredibly reliable group of allies.

Shifting my gaze into the distance, my scanning arrays caught numerous dark shapes taking flight from the edges of both the eastern and western walls. Counting the silhouettes of the insects fluttering through the gathering dark, I slowly exhaled the air trapped in my lungs.

Alright, the conditions are perfectly primed.

“Let’s move.”

“Yes, My Lord.”

With a weightless sensation, my frame floated smoothly into the air. It was the work of the Sword-Tail Dragonfly, its transparent wings vibrating in short, rapid bursts right above my head. Beside me, Paula was hoisted into the airspace by the secondary dragonfly model. Securely cradled by these two colossal insects, we accelerated toward the gentle slope in a single heartbeat.

Our targeted objectives were the crabapple trees, their branches bending under the weight of the red fruit.

Commanding my dragonfly to execute a tight approach to the first tree, I extended my arm to touch the branch. In my free hand, I retrieved a white stone from my inventory interface. Taking one more deep breath to lock down my mental fortitude, I channeled raw mana into the glow-stone and tossed it straight into the canopy so that it snagged neatly on the twigs.

A dazzling lumen output instantly flooded the area, brilliantly illuminating the entire crabapple tree.

In the deepening twilight, a single tree radiated light as if adorned in spectacular festive illuminations. Naturally, there was absolute zero probability that the Great-Eyed Moths would omit such an explicit aggression trigger from their tracking parameters. Drawn to the light like a magnet, several pairs of wings bearing grotesque eyeball patterns began fluttering toward the coordinates.

Drawing the gathering Great-Eyed Moths in until the absolute last fraction of a second before impact, I opened my inventory interface and executed a rapid harvesting loop. Of course, my target wasn’t the sparkling glow-stone—I vacuumed the dense clusters of crabapples straight into my inventory.

The exact dynamic split second the red fruit vanished to leave the branches completely bare, the dragonfly handling Paula shifted its vectors to accelerate toward the next tree. Ken-chan, cradling my own frame, followed flawlessly in its wake without a single frame of hesitation.

A single breath too late, the dormant vanguard of the Hornet Swarm executed their wake loop. Entering the exact same coordinates without a moment’s delay was the high-volume influx of Great-Eyed Moths.

And just like that, the Hornet-Moth War officially logged its opening cycle.

Craning my neck to verify that the chaotic skirmish had successfully triggered behind us, our unit systematically replicated the exact same protocol at the secondary tree. We targeted a slightly isolated tree for the third run, shifted to a highly prominent central tree for the fourth, and by the fraction of a second the fifth crabapple tree erupted into brilliant light, the battlefront had expanded exponentially across the entire sector.

Sprinting out from the woodlands bordering the perimeter walls, endless swarms of Great-Eyed Moths flew along a straight vector toward the illuminated hills. Answering the intrusion, the Hornet Swarms continuously boiled out from their structural tunnels to launch a ferocious counter-offensive.

Evaluating their stats, it initially appeared that the Great-Eyed Moths—who suffered from a total lack of raw physical attack metrics—would be systematically liquidated, but their tactical status disruptions proved exceptionally potent. Blinded and disoriented by the heavy clouds of scattered scales, and thoroughly scrambled by the grotesque eyeball patterns, the hornets succumbed to cognitive failure and began aggressively deploying friendly fire against their own hive mates.

Furthermore, a non-zero volume of hornets found themselves completely smothered by sheer numbers of moths, their fragile wings fracturing under the weight as they plummeted heavily to the soil. While a hornet’s wings are masterfully engineered to be lightweight to optimize high-velocity flight, that precise material specification makes them incredibly brittle against physical pressure.

Granted, as far as raw baseline combat metrics were concerned, the Hornet Swarm commanded absolute superiority, meaning the Great-Eyed Moths were rapidly being crushed into wreckage on the ground. However, an even greater volume of moths was continuously surging out from the margins to overwhelm their lines.

Cradling Paula and me within their talons, the two Sword-Tail Dragonflies accelerated straight up the hill, slicing right through the epicenter of the cataclysmic insect war. Because they maintained a low-altitude hover-flight matrix that skimmed bare inches above the dirt, zero hornets flagged our frames as alien entities or launched hostile vectors against us. Every single unit was pushing its AI to its absolute limit, desperately trying to purge the invasive moths breaching their sovereign territory.

“We are executing landing protocols, My Lord.”

“ …Right.“

Our navigation vectors successfully hitting the targeted colony aperture, Paula and I finally planted our boots against the solid, hard earth. Pivoting on my heel to scan the downward coordinates, the mid-tier slopes of the hill illuminated by the glow-stones had been transformed into a catastrophic war zone where infinite numbers of venomous stingers and blinding scales clashed in the air. The soil below was heavily littered with a dense carpet of insect carcasses.

Even though I was the absolute architect who had engineered this script, the panoramic view was undeniably gruesome.

The sudden inspiration to deploy this strategy had clicked in my mind during our initial retreat phase, where we had inadvertently routed the pursuing hornets straight into the sovereign territory of the dragonflies. If a hostile demographic intends to crush our network using the absolute violence of numbers, the smartest calculation is to simply source a matching volume of entities from a secondary demographic to cancel out the variable. Fighting the violence of numbers with a matching layout of numbers—that was the core theorem.

However, the resident dragonflies flatly refuse to abandon the airspace commanding the central lake. Because the spatial gap separating the lake from the colony hills was far too large, manually guiding a hornet train across that distance represented a non-viable strategy.

On that front, the Great-Eyed Moths were an exceptionally easy demographic to integrate into the loop; as long as a unit vents a high-visibility light source, they will automatically log a target and converge on the coordinates in a heartbeat.

As a brief chronological note, during our initial sandbox testing phase with the glow-stones, the absolute volume of grotesque moths crawling over the light triggered such a severe wave of physiological revulsion in Mia that she lost control of her parameters and accidentally discharged a <Fire Bullet> straight into the swarm.

As a direct result of that accident, we discovered that the moths possessed a catastrophic weakness to fire, burning down to ash instantly while channeling an immense, high-volume payload of experience points straight into our levels. Thanks to that accidental farming loop, Mia’s profile had successfully crossed the Level 25 milestone ahead of schedule. Moving forward, this exact configuration was bound to become the absolute standardized level-up template for any units in our network possessing fire-type magic arrays.

“The safety parameters here align with our calculations. Let us enter,” Paula noted, peer-checking the cave entrance.

“Phew… it looks like the opening phase executed flawlessly,” I sighed, letting out the tension locked in my chest.

The blueprint relied on a highly coordinated split-deployment: first, Paula and I would ride the dragonflies across the lower mid-tier slopes to summon the moths, generating a massive localized diversion. The exact split second the bulk of the hornet garrison evacuated the tunnels to manage the external crisis, the remaining members of our core vanguard—their gear thoroughly blanketed in our specialised Monster Repellent—would silently slide up to the primary aperture, launch a high-velocity breach into the nest, and systematically liquidate the colony’s central alpha unit.

Because my inventory interface was the only asset in our entire network capable of instantaneously harvesting a tree’s entire fruit yield to clear the canopy, the role of executing the bait drop had inevitably mapped onto my profile.

Paula had initially launched a high-intensity administrative protest against the arrangement, but the moment I requested her presence to command the dragonfly vanguards and navigate our flight vectors, she softly dropped her objections and complied. Ensuring that I had previously hard-coded the directive that I highly desired her frame to remain permanently anchored by my side across all deployment scenarios had paid massive dividends here.

Given that our database possessed absolute zero structural blueprints detailing the interior layout of this bug colony, this segment of the conquest carried a heavy trace of chaotic, step-by-step improvisation—yet based on current telemetry, every single loop was checking off successfully.

Because the massive wing-span metrics of our Sword-Tail Dragonflies would cause them to hit a physical bottleneck and get stuck inside the narrow subterranean tunnels, the two insect thralls were ordered to remain stationary at the threshold. Issuing a rigid security directive commanding them to hold the entryway to the absolute death, we formally crossed the perimeter into the deep darkness of the nest.

Illuminated by our glow-stone lanterns, the soil walls of the colony tunnel verified comprehensively packed and dense; zero data indicated a risk of structural collapse. However, a closer audit of the corridor revealed shattered hornet carcasses scattered across the path at regular intervals. It appeared our breach vanguard had systematically dismantled them during their initial entry sweep.

Utilizing Bone-ko-chan as our designated point decoy to anchor the frontline, we dialed up our running velocity to close the distance and re-establish a link with our advance team.

After a steady downward march of roughly five minutes, a vibrant, bright illumination manifested across our forward line of sight. The structural data indicated the corridor was opening into a colossal central chamber. Simultaneously, the unmistakable echoes of active combat loops vibrated through the stone walls, reaching our ears.

It appeared that the specific tunnel entrance meticulously selected by Heimo’s sharp senses and Ethan-san’s veteran observation stats had been the absolute correct path.

Our primary objective finally manifesting right before our eyes, we kicked our legs into a fast sprint to clear the final stretch of the tunnel.

“Whew… pant… gasp… Our standard damage outputs are registering zero meaningful impact ticks against its frame!”

“Damn it, damn it, damn it! The generation rate is infinite! Exactly what kind of broken spawn algorithm is running down here?!”

“Ugh, another wave just initialized!”

“Maintain your cognitive equilibrium! Do not permit a single millisecond of downtime to interrupt your attack loops!”

“Go get ’em~! Kuu-chi, hit that specific quadrant, right there!”

Guided by the chorus of familiar voices, we burst through the final threshold—only to freeze in absolute astonishment as we made landfall inside a colossal subterranean cavern.

Deployed across the chamber, fighting with every ounce of their remaining stamina, was our advance vanguard. And hovering directly over the airspace commanding the center of the zone—

Was a comprehensively massive, terrifyingly giant hornet.