Information Warfare

"Well, the kid’s got me interested." Ragna grinned and folded his arms.

"Go ahead, Xander." Seeing that everyone was properly invested, Xander nodded and began explaining.

"The idea goes like this..."

***

It was around 4 in the morning where they started getting ready.

’Think you can do it?’ Xander asked Curtis via telepathy.

’Well, the good thing about this Ice Diamond is that my mana consumption has pretty much been reduced to zero. Sadly, my long range targeting hasn’t improved much. But I should still be able to pull it off.’ Curtis shrugged.

’Which is why you have me.’ Aubrey hummed through the link. Due to her now absurd perception range, she’d become something of a targeting system for them when it came to long ranged targeting.

’In that case, you got it.’ He gave Curtis a thumbs up before quickly retreating from the frontlines, not intended to be caught in what happened next.

As such, Curtis was left alone at the frontlines that were empty and filled with the ashes of dead ants.

He stared at the different holes and felt as though, in their depths, numerous eyes were watching him. Such a visual was... disconcerting, but he forced it down.

With that thought, he raised his wand and started to chant.

"Lock down the battlefield. Condense the atmosphere into deadly spires. Unleash the frost! Ice Magic: Permafrost Barrage!" Behind him, over a hundred blue magic circles materialized, each aimed at a different angle as per Aubrey’s instructions.

Once they were aimed properly, a barrage ice spikes erupted from the circles, each one at least 5 meters long.

Immediately, the mountainside where the catacombs began was peppered with the lances, and several soared high in arcs before landing on the openings at the top where the flying ants typically emerged from.

Destruction-wise, there wasn’t actually much to be said. Infact, the spikes just lodged themselves in like poles rather than throwing up dust or destroying terrain.

But that wasn’t the intention.

Twirling his wand, numerous ice strings manifested and flew to where each spike was connected, then the strings connected the spikes to one another, creating something akin to a tapestry. Moreover, because of how his magic worked now, when the strings connected, the whole thing technically became one structure with durability far higher than should have made sense.

Exhaling, Curtis felt his connection with this new singular structure. Then he completely released the lid on his mana pool.

Instantly, the temperature around him plummeted with Curtis acting like a thermal sink. The air around him entering a super-frozen state.

It wasn’t just him either. With the structure connected to him, it also exhibited the same signs, and the mountainside’s temperature dropped dramatically.

In the distance, the Captain watched this happen with a pair of binoculars and couldn’t help but marvel in his heart.

"... Even though I’d seen it before, it’s still baffling to see. This is power approaching that of a High Mage." He mumbled as a cold breeze blew over them, causing goosebumps to break out on his skin.

It felt less like a spell and more like an environmental phenomenon, especially since, even from there, he could feel how the ambient mana was slowly being turned into ice affinity mana.

Aubrey, who was observing from even farther away, hummed.

’I wonder what would happen if he truly decided to just sit in one location and let this happen indefinitely. Would an Elemental Spirit really be born like Mary said?’ She wondered as, in her thermal vision, that area was turning black dye to the insanely low temperatures.

Now, what was the purpose of all of this?

Well, simply put, manually manning the frontlines wasn’t feasible, no matter how one tried to put it. The lack of forces wasn’t something Landor could overcome in a short time.

So Xander proposed that they automated it.

Aubrey had replayed the scene of the ants freezing the moment they came into contact with Curtis’s frozen corpses wall, and when they did, they would also become a part of the structure, essentially turning it into an environmental hazard. Adding to the fact that ants were cold-blooded, and that the manufactured plague couldn’t spread if the ants were frozen, as proven during the previous attack, it wasn’t a stretch to say that Curtis was their hard counter to quite some extent.

However, in her vision, while the blackness that was the cold encroached wildly, there were still some spots that seemed to have been missed.

This was done on purpose.

Again, if they defended too well, the ants would grow desperate, but if they didn’t do it well enough, they would get overrun.

Hence, Aubrey and Xander proposed that they specially allow certain openings to exist where just enough ants could come out to attack without it being something they couldn’t handle.

Eventually, enough of the area had been frozen, and Curtis was given the instruction to retreat. He no longer needed to consciously maintain the construct as its nature pretty much made it self sustaining.

’Aubrey, you’re up.’ Xander said through the link, and she just hummed.

Sure enough, the abnormality caused the ants to stir, and Aubrey immediately shifted her perception so she could perceive the frequency the ants used to communicate.

Without hesitation, she silently took a hold of it.

Within her mana pool, several books floated around her, each of them showing different scenes the ants had seen before perishing as per recording information. She’d spent the last few hours learning how they communicated with mana to allow this part of the plan to progress smoothly. After all, if she wasn’t careful, there was a decent chance would detect the information tampering and respond accordingly.

But another perk of her library was that it made her remarkable at replicating certain things, and this was one of them. After all, it wasn’t a language in a typical sense, but a telepathic network that transmitted visual and auditory data.

Hence, when she detected ants moving towards the barrier Curtis had created, she observed the telepathic network closely. Then, when the first worker ant saw one part of the barrier and got close to it, its body was frozen shortly after.

When it did, information was sent from its corpse into the network, getting passed towards where she assumed the closest queens were.

Aubrey immediately hijacked the information that was getting passed through the network and quietly and altered it.

It initially showed the worker ant approaching the barrier and slowly getting its thermal energy sucked out before coming to a stop and dying. But Aubrey changed this, and the result? It looked like the ant had encountered a strange earth barrier that slowly petrified it as it got closer, turning it into stone

She concentrated intensely on this, ensuring that not a slip of information went past her. And even the ants that didn’t die by the barrier but simply observed it from a distance had the information they sent back altered.

As she did this, Aubrey noticed that, through the same telepathic network, instructions were actually coming in and commanding the workers, and for a moment, she considered altering these instructions to make them do the wrong thing, but she soon rejected the idea. That would be a surefire way to get her to expose herself.

She did read the instructions, though, and it was a bit odd comprehending the ’language’ the queens sent. It was less a language and more of a wave of intent that caused the ants to perform in a certain manner.

It was an intriguing thing, she had to admit, but her goal was still the same. Which is why she was surprised when she grasped that the instructions sent was for them to essentially ram themselves into the barrier. This confused Aubrey briefly, but she soon grasped that the queens were trying to understand the barrier in more detail, so they were sending the workers to die in different ways so that their consequent countermeasures would cover all bases.

’... Insane.’ For a moment, Aubrey couldn’t grasp how a living creature could so decisively send forth its own kin to die in large numbers like this, but she remembered what Xander said.

’In the first place, the ants aren’t like us, where there are soldiers with egos and morale. Instead, its akin to one massive superorgamism. But more than that, the way they function is akin to a system.’

The ants did not have individuality, and they most likely did not have emotions, either. But most of all, they weren’t humans. They probably didn’t have any sense of morals, so applying the morals of sentient creatures like humans to them was a pointless endeavor.

As such, she pressed her feelings down and focused on making the fake information that was sent back to be more convincing and detailed.

It was only after an hour that the wave of suicidal ants finally retreated, and Aubrey let out a breath, slumping in a chair both in real life and in her mana pool, massaging her temples.

After a few moments, she mused internally.

’Individuality, huh?’ The ’her’ in her mana pool lingered for a moment, then stood.

She tapped her chest, then streams of information flowed out, turning into a book. Flipping through it, she nodded. All the information inside was ’her’.

Then she made an empty book and transmitted some of the information in the first one into it. Not everything, but enough.

That book then shone, and a figure outlined itself around it before condensing into... Aubrey.

The two Aubreys looked at each other, smiled, and both started working on all the new information that had been gathered.

At the same time, in the book "I Came, I Saw, I Record", the first page, which Aubrey hadn’t been able to grasp before, suddenly became legible, and the golden words on the cover suddenly shone brightly.

Startled, Aubrey looked at the book, her eyes going wide.

’What is...?!’ She went over and slowly turned the first page, and her pupils constricted sharply when she saw its contents.

’Th-This is...?!’