Re:Ant Lord-Chapter 181: Southern Sky Exit

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A faint white ripple shimmered in the dark ahead, like a silk thread in a black ocean. It wasn’t a gate. It wasn’t even a door. It was a tear. It was fragile, trembling with unstable light, barely wide enough to notice, and pulsing with the silent scream of cosmic strain.

Kai exhaled through clenched teeth. "So it’s a blind jump. Could be a swamp, a mountain, or straight into a beast’s mouth."

He turned his head slowly.

Azhara was still clinging to him, now conscious but dazed. Her crimson eyes fluttered open, groggy but focused.

"You’re awake." Kai asked.

"Sort of," she whispered. Her voice was weak, cracked. "Sir... everything hurts."

Kai gave a tired grunt. "Yeah. I know the feeling."

Azhara blinked, frowning as she slowly realized the pressure surrounding them. "Where... are we?"

"Between worlds," Kai answered flatly. "A glitch between threads. And we’re about to leave... assuming we don’t get shredded on the way out."

She looked past his shoulder, toward the glowing rip in the void, then back at him. "You’re... too big to fit through that."

"Yeah. I have to change."

Without another word, Kai summoned his will inward.

The transformation began.

His Monarch armor-like body folded inward with a metallic hiss, red-black beast muscle sliding into human flesh. Antennae coiled back into his scalp like twitching vines retreating. The jagged tail retracted into his spine. The sharp claws melted into fingers. Chitin smoothed into skin. His limbs shortened, but condensed with coiled strength. The polished exoskeleton became the muscle and bone of his humanoid form.

The metamorphosis burned through his body like boiling oil beneath skin. Bones snapped. Muscles rewired. His veins felt like they had been dipped in magma, only to cool under pressure.

Azhara gasped against his back, her arms still tightly wrapped around him. She felt the sharp ridges smooth into warmth. What had been hard armor became dense muscle and warm flesh.

"Still warm," she whispered absently, her lips brushing his spine. "Still... you."

Kai didn’t answer. His jaw remained clenched, eyes locked on the breach.

Then came the final system message:

[Ding! System Notification: Passage Ready.

Stability Window: 20 seconds.

Prepare for compressed teleportation.

Turbulence and spatial distortion are imminent.

Warning: Destination unknown. Risk Level: Medium. ]

Kai extended one arm behind him, palm open.

"Hold on. Otherwise you will be sent to different location."

Azhara obeyed instantly.

She wrapped her arms tighter around his chest, her legs circling his waist. Her body molded to his back. Her newly reshaped ant-hybrid form clung to him instinctively. Her fur-lined thighs pressed into his hips. Her soft and bouncy chest squished firmly against his spine, eliciting a brief flicker of awareness in his nerves.

She whispered, "I’ll go anywhere... just don’t let go." Her breath was hot against his neck.

Kai swallowed once and nodded. The warmth of her words grounded him but his eyes remained hard. Focused.

The light widened like a mouth, the tear now breathing with invisible pressure.

Reality itself began to bend and shake, as if some invisible force was turning the fabric of space inside out.

He stepped toward it. Every movement was slow. Purposeful. His core pulsed. His system hummed. They had survived rifts, beasts, death and each other.

Now they would survive the unknown location. Together, they stepped into the light. And the void screamed behind them.

A red streak burned across the southern forest sky, like a falling star set aflame. It tore through cloud layers with explosive velocity, each layer flaring into fiery rings as it passed. The horizon flashed white, birds shrieked in disarray, and entire flocks scattered into chaos.

Below, deep in the forest, beasts whimpered. Alpha predators slunk into shadowed dens. Trees shivered from the sudden burst of pressure above.

Then—

CRAAACK—!!

The streak split in two.

A faint shape—Azhara—was torn free from Kai back, her grip finally slipping. Her scream was lost in the roar of descent as her body spun wildly, tumbling like a loose meteor fragment. She vanished toward a distant patch of trees, hundreds of meters off course.

BOOM!!!

A pillar of earth erupted skyward.

Kai slammed into the soil like an asteroid, a shockwave blasting outward in all directions. Trees bent. Rocks exploded. Birds went silent. The impact crater devoured a small clearing, flattening everything within a thirty-meter radius. Heat shimmered off the impact zone like summer fire off a kiln mouth.

In the center of the smoldering wreckage, a body lay half-buried in crushed dirt and shattered tree bark all fell underground.

Kai.

His muscles twitched. Steam hissed off his armor. His antennae were gone, but a soft pulse of light beat beneath his skin.

Then—

His fingers flexed.

His eyes opened. Red. Glowing. Livid with life.

"...What... just happened..." he rasped, voice dry as bone dust.

He pushed against the cave wall, his limbs heavy. His aura was low. His core felt like it had been wrung out, like every atom had fought a war across dimensions.

But he was alive.

The scent of burnt ozone was fading. Now, all he could smell was earth, smoke, and something nasty.

And something else.

Something is watching.

He rose slowly to one knee. His vision spun for a heartbeat, then settled. Around him everything stood silent, the ground trembling from the shockwave. Birds chirped again in the distance. The wind returned.

He was back.

Wherever this was... it wasn’t the void.

He touched his temple, half expecting the system to be silent again. But a soft pulse flickered across his senses.

[System Notification: Reconnection Successful. Core Sync at 43%. Aura Recharge Active.]

Kai exhaled. Then his eyes narrowed.

Azhara.

He remembered her fall. The way her arms had loosened at the last moment, her beautiful body whipped by gravitational fury.

He clenched his jaw. "She’s somewhere in this area."

His instincts screamed that she wasn’t dead. He’d branded her. He would know if her life flame had vanished.

The surrounding area was full of dust clouds. It was like some kind of tunnel.